In an essay for Page Turner, critic Lee Siegel reflects on the state of contemporary critical culture, the increasingly “social” (and positive) tone in reviewing, and why he’s done writing negative book reviews. One reason for the changing climate is, of course, the internet: “Authority is a slippery thing, and its nature is going through yet another permutation in literary life. There are plenty of young, gifted critics writing fiercely and argumentatively in relatively obscure Web publications. But they are keenly aware that, along with the target of their scrutiny, the source of their own

The decision of Goodreads to enforce a policy prohibiting users from commenting on authors’ behavior—only their books—has already generated seventy pages of comments and cries of censorship from angry users.

Simon and Schuster has signed journalist Eleanor Randolph to write a “major biography” of outgoing mayor Bloomberg. According to the press release, the book will be about the “extraordinary career and legacy of Bloomberg, who revolutionized business reporting, who has been a powerful and innovative mayor of New York City for the last 12 years, and who has become a public figure of national

Columbus, Ohio publisher Two Dollar Radio is branching into the world of movies with their own “micro-budget film division,” Two Dollar Radio Movie Pictures. The division has already optioned two movies and plans to bring in more with money raised through crowdsourcing and incentives from authors like Grace Krilanovich, Scott McClanahan, Barbara Browning, and Joshua Mohr. Here’s a trailer for the project:

[bookforumVideo type="vimeo" key="74684169" img\id="0" img\url=""] Is it a fact that Amazon is killing off independent booksellers? Perhaps not, argues Nate Hoffeider at “The Digital Reader”

Kate Losse, author of The Boy Kings, has accused Dave Eggers of "rewriting" her book in his forthcoming novelThe Circle, which will be published in October. The Boy Kings is Losse's nonfiction account of her time as one of the early employees of Facebook. The Circle is also about a young woman who moves up the ranks of a company that bears a strong resemblance to Google, and gradually becomes disenchanted with the company’s ethos of transparency and information gathering. Losse admits that she has not yet read Eggers's novel.

The Jane Austen’s House Museum has raised nearly $250,000 in a

Finalists for the National Book Award in fiction have been announced. They are Pacific by Tom Drury, The End of the Point by Elizabeth Graver, The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner, The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra, The Good Lord Bird by James McBride, Someone by Alice McDermott, Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon, Tenth of December by George Saunders, and Fools by Joan Silber.

In lieu of teaching sex education in schools, Russian government officials are instructing children to look to literature for advice on love: “The best sex education that

The National Book Foundation has released their longlist for National Book Award in Nonfiction. The nominees are T.D. Allman’s Finding Florida, Gretel Ehrlich’s Face the Wave, Scott C. Johnson’s The Wolf and the Watchman, Jill Lepore’s Book of Ages, Wendy Lower’s Hitler’s Furies, James Oakes’s Freedom National, George Packer’s The Unwinding, Alan Taylor’s The Internal Enemy, Terry Teachout’s Duke, and Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear. The finalists will be announced on Oct. 16, and the winner will be named on Nov. 20.

At Vice, Marilynne Robinson talks with former student Thessaly La Force about

Terrible news from England this week: Former Smiths frontman Morrissey has cancelled his forthcoming autobiography with Penguin after a conflict with the publisher. According to a statement posted on a fan website: "Although Morrissey's autobiography was set to be available throughout the UK on September 16th, a last-minute content disagreement between Penguin Books and Morrissey has caused the venture to collapse. No review copies were printed, and Morrissey is now in search of a new publisher." At least we still have his music.

IFC Films has bought the U.S. rights to Liza Johnson's Hateship

In the New York Times, author Joyce Maynard reflects on the years she spent with J.D. Salinger (having dropped out of college in order to live with him) and casts a cool eye on his relationships with with much younger women. What troubles Maynard most about how the public has reacted to news of Salinger’s affairs is “the quiet acceptance, apparently alive and well in our culture, of the notion that genius justifies cruel or abusive treatment of those who serve the artist and his art.”

Five years after publishing The Family, a journalistic investigation into a “self-described invisible network

Public intellectual, writer, Times Square expert, and longtime Dissent contributor Marshall Berman died in New York last week at the age of 72. Todd Gitlin summed up Berman, whose books include All That Is Solid Melts into Air, as a "master lyric-analytic Marxist, defiant chronicler of cities, activist, sage, dear friend." Harper’s will never, ever post its content for free on the internet, says publisher John MacArthur in a three-page statement in the latest issue of the magazine.

David Mitchell’s next book is “about an immortal being that gets reincarnated as different men and women.”

In

People may be reading less individually, but at Flavorwire, Jason Diamond claims that we’re in a “golden age of online book clubs.”

The 2009 publication of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland seems to have struck a chord: This fall will see the release of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Lowland, Stephen King’s Joyland, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Sisterland, Alysia Abbott’s Fairyland, Christopher Steward’s Jungleland, and Amy Sohn’s Motherland. And what’s with the overuse of “land” in contemporary book titles? “‘Land’ is the new ‘Nation,’ a modifier that hints at larger zeitgeisty themes while also intriguing the reader,”

How has Catcher in the Rye been received in Russia? “First introduced to readers during Khrushchev’s thaw, Salinger’s novel became an instant sensation among Soviet readers in the nineteen-sixties, and it has remained a classic. The Party authorized the novel’s translation believing that it exposed the rotting core of American capitalism, but Soviet readers were more likely to see the novel in broader terms, as a psychologically nuanced and universally appealing portrait of a misfit who rebels against the pieties of a conformist society.”

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