In a move befitting the maestro himself, Observer reporter Nate Freeman gets into a fistfight at the book party for J. Michael Lennon’s new Norman Mailer biography.

Though it’s only been out for a week, Morrissey’s autobiography has rocketed to the top of the UK bestseller list, making it one of the fastest-selling memoirs ever. Morrissey's Penguin Classic has already sold around 35,000 copies in Britain. (Only Kate McCann's 2011 memoir Madeleine, about the disappearance of her daughter, did better, selling 72,500 copies the first week.) Mysteriously, there’s still no sign that it will be

The digitization of the world’s great writers continues apace: Thanks to a new open-access website, thousands of manuscripts by Emily Dickinson will be available for the first time in a single place. The site will pool the holdings of Amherst, Harvard, the Boston Public Library, and five other institutions, and will include facsimiles of Dickinson’s handwritten poems, scraps of paper, used envelopes, and other materials. The New York Times notes that the creation of the Emily Dickinson Archive has also revived “decades-old tensions between Harvard and Amherst, which hold the two largest Dickinson

Bookforum editor Albert Mobilio pays a visit to John Ashbery’s Hudson, New York, home—as it has been reproduced in the city for a new show at the Loretta Howard Gallery. In addition to “a selection of Ashbery’s own paintings, prints, collages, bric-a-brac, and furniture,” the exhibition includes “kitschy figurines, VHS tapes, ... bawdy toys,” all of which “evoke the multifariousness of consciousness” and create the impression of “standing inside one of Ashbery’s poems.”

From October 18 to 25, indie publisher OR Books will be running a pop-up bookshop at Alexandra, a restaurant in the West

At the Guardian, Jim Crace digests Morrissey’s sweeping new biography into a much more manageable six hundred words: “At school, I am the futile pupil brutalised by neo-fascist inquisitors who do not understand the subtleties of sublime rhyme. My only valent talent is for athletics, my event the 20-kilometre walk on water. Blood laced with disgrace flows from my hands, feet and side. 'Oh, Steven,' says my Mother Mary. ‘What have you done to yourself now?’”

The notion that in order to write you must “kill all your darlings” has been attributed to Oscar Wilde, Eudora Welty, G.K. Chesterton,

Junot Diaz and Maya Angelou were among the writers honored at the fifth annual Norman Mailer Center Benefit Gala this week. The awards celebrate authors at various stages of their career, not all of whom were particularly fond of the event’s namesake: “I am still at odds with Mr. Mailer," said Angelou. "If we had talked together, we would not agree. But he writes so well.” And Junot Diaz, when asked what Mailer’s work means to him, said: “It depends on what Mailer we’re talking about.”

When the Leo Tolstoy State Museum put out a call for volunteers to proofread 46,800 pages of the master’s

At Page Turner, Richard Brody wonders why Norman Mailer never wrote “the book that he was born to write—the bildungsroman of a Maileresque boy in Brooklyn in the nineteen-thirties.”

Early reviews are in for Morrissey’s long-awaited autobiography, and they’re all over the map. The Telegraph delivers a rave, praising the book’s “beautifully measured prose style” (and calling it “certainly the best written musical autobiography since Bob Dylan’s Chronicles”), while The Guardian is less convinced. “For its first 150 pages, Autobiography comes close to being a triumph,“ writes John Harris, “but

The finalists for the 2013 National Book Awards have been announced. In fiction, they’re Rachel Kushner for The Flamethrowers, Jhumpa Lahiri for The Lowland, James McBride for The Good Lord Bird, Thomas Pynchon for Bleeding Edge, and George Saunders for Tenth of December. In nonfiction, they’re Jill Lepore for Book of Ages, Wendy Lower for Hitler’s Furies, George Packer for The Unwinding, Alan Taylor for The Internal Enemy, and Lawrence Wright for Going Clear. The rest of the nominees are available here.Courtesy of The Onion: “10 Sandwiches that Look Like British Novelist Martin Amis.”

In an

Eleanor Catton has won the Man Booker Prize for The Luminaries, an eight-hundred-plus page novel set in 19th century New Zealand. And that’s not all: at 28, she’s the youngest Booker winner ever.

There are 300,000 people in Iceland, and according to recent statistics, one in ten of them will eventually publish a book. This might account for the Icelandic phrase "ad ganga med bok I maganum"—that every Icelander "has a book in their stomach.”

A textbook rental company in Sydney Australia has partnered with a company that specializes in unmanned aerial vehicles, a.k.a. drones, to develop what

HBO and Sony are among the studios fighting for the rights to adapt Glenn Greenwald’s forthcoming tell-all book about Edward Snowden—even though the project comes with so many thorny legal issues that one studio, 20th Century Fox, has already pulled out. Aside from the fact that there’s no ending yet, the story is likely to draw lots of government scrutiny, and it's unclear whether Greenwald and collaborator Laura Poitras will be willing to sell their life rights.

In an essay about the future of the book published to coincide with the Frankfurt Book Fair, futurist and sci-fi author Charles

Hipsters have turned on Dave Eggers, reports the Globe and Mail. Justin Slaughter is a critic and journalist in Brooklyn.Eggers became a cultural icon after the release of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and the creation of McSweeneys, but his latest novel—The Circle, a “dystopian science-fiction story” about a Google-like “evil Internet empire that controls all social media”—has left many of his fans feeling as if they have been "targeted by its satire." Hilary Mantel’s award-winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies are making the leap from the BBC to a PBS costume drama.

The cottage industry around Emily Dickinson churns out diversions at a steady pace: A new photograph purporting to show the poet was unearthed last fall, theories about her love life appear with US\-magazine like regularity, and a 2010 novel, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, attempted to channel the belle of Amherst and transform her into a book-club-ready heroine. As fun as these odds and ends can be, discoveries that shed light on Dickinson’s work—rather than on her persona—are rare. But The Gorgeous Nothings, forthcoming from New Directions, is just such a discovery, presenting facsimiles

Is Stalin best understood as an editor? From the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Even when not wielding his [signature] blue pencil, Stalin's editorial zeal was all-consuming. He excised people—indeed whole peoples—out of the manuscript of worldly existence, had them vanished from photographs and lexicons, changed their words and the meanings of their words, edited conversations as they happened, backing his interlocutors into more desirable (to him) formulations.”

Bloomberg Businessweek runs an excerpt of Brad Stone’s The Everything Store, a forthcoming book about Jeff Bezos and the ascent