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

It’s very popular to wring your hands over the death of the book (and the industries that go along with it), but publishing isn’t actually doing as badly as many people think, writes Evan Hughes at the New Republic. At the end of the day, books are still products that people want to purchase—in print or digitally—and the numbers bear that out. Since 2008, “e-book revenue has skyrocketed—by more than 4,500 percent. Just as important, the boom has come at surprisingly little expense to higher- priced hardcovers and paperbacks, sales of which are only slightly down.”

Lore Segal talks death, fairy

Accuracy, tone, and directness: At the New York Times Book Review, Daniel Mendelsohn and Dana Stevens discuss the qualities they look for in a good translation.

Superagent Andrew Wylie talks with the New Republic about his e-publishing initiative, the rise of Amazon (“I am not one of those who thinks that Amazon’s publishing business is an effort marked by sincerity”), and why the London Book Fair is “like being at a primary school in Lagos.”

How is William Boyd’s new James Bond different from the hard-nosed 007 of yore? For one thing, says Boyd, he’s much more in touch with his emotions: “

New Yorkers: Come to ApexArt tonight for the latest installment of Bookforum editor Albert Mobilio’s Double Take—an evening that asks three pairs of authors to “trade takes on a shared experience.” Tonight’s event will have Christopher Sorrentino and Andrew Hultkrans considering Richard Nixon on his centenary, Cathy Park Hong and Nelly Reifler imagining futuristic surveillance, and Mary Jo Bang and Timothy Donnelly reporting on reading Kafka's Amerika.

A scrappy little lab at Columbia is looking at book piracy. The organization, piracy.lab, grew out of Professor Dennis Tenen’s observation that

The journal Science has published a study in which two New School psychologists argue that reading “literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction,” will improve your social skills and your emotional intelligence. According to the study, a book by Chekhov will make you more empathetic than one by Gillian Flynn. (Mary Gaitskill would probably agree.)

Yes, Morrissey’s much, much-anticipated autobiography is coming out this month. The book will be released on October 17th in the UK as a Penguin Classic—rare for a living author. Representatives say that Morrissey currently

Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets

The painter Jane Freilicher met poet John Ashbery in New York City in 1949. A the time she lived upstairs from Kenneth Koch, who would become known—along with Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler—as a member of the New York School Poets. Though best known as wrters, all four members of the New York School were deeply interested in art (Ashbery and Schuyler went on to be art critics, and O’Hara worked at MoMA). By the early 1950s they had become part of a group associated with the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which included painters such as Larry Rivers,

“Is monster erotica lucrative?” New York Magazine talks to two Texas college students who have made more than mid-career accountants and engineers at Boeing by writing adult novels with titles like Taken By the T-Rex and Ravished by the Triceratops.

At the Page Turner blog, Adelle Waldman considers why (and how) novelists fail to adequately address the subject of female beauty.

The new, all digital Newsweek is staffing up, and they’ve already poached some good writers, including Jezebel’s Katie Baker and the New York Times’s Karla Zabludovsky.

Dave Eggers released a statement this week in

In a thinly veiled attempt to make sure that nobody ever turns off their Kindle, Amazon has been prodding the Federal Aviation Administration to revise their rules about turning off electronic devices during takeoff and landings. Recent tests conducted both by Amazon and an FAA panel have found that use of electronics—contrary to conventional wisdom—have no effect on planes.

Even though Norman Rush is often credited with writing one of the most psychologically nuanced female characters in contemporary fiction (the unnamed narrator of Mating), that doesn’t mean that he’s especially good at

Bestselling author Tom Clancy died this morning of undisclosed caused as a hospital in Baltimore. He was sixty-six. The Times has more. 

In a puzzled and negative review of Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project, Dwight Garner wonders how Franzen “could loom so tall in his novels yet seem so shriveled in his nonfiction,” and notes that while Franzen’s “drive-by pea shootings” on technology fall short, the author’s “whole mode of being — the way he mostly runs silent and deep, issuing a novel every 10 years or so, refusing to embrace social media — was already his most incisive possible rebuke

Philip Roth was awarded a Commander of the Legion of Honor award at the French embassy in New York last week for his contributions to literature and longstanding relationship with France. In a speech, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabuis attributed Roth’s “immense success in France” to his “art of storytelling, your irony and self-depreciation, which is not typically French.”

The good news in a new National Endowment for the Arts survey is that more than half of all Americans read for pleasure in 2012; the bad news is that the number of people reading what the NEA calls "literature"—i.e.

The Collaboration, Ben Urwand's new book about Hollywood’s "pact with Hitler," was published last month and has already, unsurprisingly, stirred up all kinds of controversy. In a review of Urwand’s book,The New Yorker's David Denby wondered why Harvard University Press had chosen to publish the book, citing what he deemed its many “omissions and blunders.” Denby also urged Harvard UP to “acknowledge these problems and correct them in a revised edition that is better informed, if less sensational.” In response to the review, Harvard UP issued a statement supporting Urwand’s work, and directing