A new UK survey finds that 62 percent of the British public has lied about reading classic novels, with George Orwell’s 1984 being the novel that most Britons have falsely claimed to have read, followed by War and Peace and Great Expectations. According to the Daily Mail, “women are more likely than men to bluff that they are well read when they have often only seen literary classics dramatised in films or on TV.”

Matthew Shear, the publisher of St. Martin’s Press, died of complications arising from lung cancer last week at his home in Manhattan. He was 57.

Harper Lee has dropped a lawsuit

A handful of German publishers took the fight against book piracy to a new level last week when they collectively filed suit against two newspapers simply for printing the name of a website that sells pirated copies of e-books.

Jennifer Weiner, who not long ago took the New York Times Book Review to task for not publishing enough women, is after the paper again, this time for its new Bookends column. In a series of tweets, Weiner lambasted the NYTBR for being too "literary" (that is, for excluding commercial writers), and characterized the first column as being “toothless, tepid, engineered.”

It’s pre-Nobel Prize speculation time, and British betting establishment Ladbrokes has Haruki Murakami at 3-1 odds to win the Nobel Prize in Literature this year.

The trajectory of J.K. Rowling’s pseudonymously written book The Cuckoo’s Nest—it was ignored and then became a bestseller after the author’s true identity was revealed—reflects how hard it is for a first-time author to get any attention... even if they deserve it.

Jason Kottke describes the trailer for Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge as “either brilliant or the dumbest thing ever.” We’re inclined to agree with the latter.

Here’s

The new Bookforum is among us. Available online: Ed Park's review of Thomas Pynchon's new novel of Uptown Manhattan and the Deep Web, and Mary Gaitskill's meditation on what's truly disturbing about Gone Girl.

In the olden days, public intellectuals would hold court in magazines and newspapers, and scholars would publish in scholarly journals and with university presses. Today, Jill Lepore notes in the Chronicle of Higher Education,"'writing for the public’ is ... a fairly meaningless thing to say. Everyone who tweets ‘writes for the public.' Lectures are posted online. So are papers. Most of

John Scalzi has won the Hugo award—the sci-fi genre’s highest prize—for Redshirts, “a comedic novel about a group of ensigns aboard a spaceship who discover they are actually part of a television show similar to ‘Star Trek.’”

Actors Dakota Johnson and Charlie Hunnam (who you might remember as Lloyd on “Undeclared”) have been cast as Anastasia and Christian in the film adaptation of the first volume of the Fifty Shades of Gray series.

In the latest issue of the New York Times Magazine, Wyatt Mason profiles Norman Rush, and recounts the author’s broken promise to his wife—“that his next novel

Readers! Update your bookmarks! Paper Trail is now here: http://blogs.bookforum.com/paper/

What’s Jonathan Lethem reading? “Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary and Edward St. Aubyn’s Melrose books and Lydia Millet’s Magnificence just now, while at the bedside table and on trains and airplanes I’m grinding away at monsters over a period of months, if not years: Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle.”

In our age of “entrepreneurial journalism,” when writers are under pressure to be their own brands, what happens when business and journalism collide? At the Atlantic

In response to widespread opposition over a plan to scrap centuries-old book stacks at the New York Public Library’s flagship 42nd Street branch, NYPL President Anthony Marx has come up with a new proposal, which he unveiled this week to the Wall Street Journal. Instead of getting rid of the stacks to make room for a new circulating library, the revised design will incorporate the stacks “as a prominent feature” into the library. According to the Journal, the new design will also “make a section of the historic stacks accessible to the public for the first time.”

In a review of two memoirs—one

Contrary to claims that an excerpt of Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens in the New York Times’ T Magazine marked the first time that the Gray Lady had included the f-word in print, Jim Romenesko points out that the paper runs the expletive all the fucking time.

A Shanghai metro line has introduced its own library that allows riders to take out a book when they get on the train and return it when they’ve reached their destination. From the Los Angeles Times: “Special bookshelves are installed at the metro stations, containing rows books for the taking. There's no registration necessary, and

At Outward, Slate’s new LGBT blog, Masha Gessen explains why Putin’s crackdown on gay families prompted her to leave Russia.

Parks and Rec star Aziz Ansari has signed a $3.5 million deal with Penguin Press to write an “investigation” into modern romance and online dating. In a statement, Ansari said the book would address the “entirely new era for singles, in which the basic issues facing a single person—whom we meet, how we meet them, and what happens next—have been radically altered by new technologies."

Congratulations to Jonathan Lethem for eroding the Gray Lady’s veneer of formality and

A forthcoming documentary on J.D. Salinger has so far been shrouded in secrecy, but with the film coming out soon, details are starting to emerge. Among them, one “big reveal” is that before he died Salinger “instructed his estate to publish at least five additional books — some of them entirely new, some extending past work — in a sequence that he intended to begin as early as 2015.” Included are new stories about the Glass and Caulfield families. The film also elaborates on Salinger’s personal relationships, including his marriage to his first wife, who was suspected of being a Gestapo agent,

In the recent issue of Harper’s, William Vollmann talks about getting ahold of his FBI file through a Freedom of Information Act request, and learning that he was suspected both of being the Unabomber and the anthrax mailer. Vollmann was dubbed "Unabomber Suspect Number S-2047" after an anonymous tipster sent his name to the FBI, telling the Bureau that the author "owns many guns and a flame-thrower." And that wasn’t the only thing the feds found suspicious: "UNABOMBER, not unlike VOLLMANN has pride of authorship and insists his book be published without editing," the file states, also noting

"What ever happened to the Best Music Writing series?" As Vice reports, the 2012 issue, which was supposed to be edited by ?uestlove, was never published, although $17,733 was donated towards the book via Kickstarter. Where's the money? Series editor Daphne Carr says, "I have no comment."

Jonathan Lethem has put together an annotated playlist of songs that inspired his forthcoming novel, Dissident Gardens. Gang of Four, Lou Reed, and Bob Dylan all make appearances.

Only seven months after Barnes and Noble founder Leonard S. Riggio announced his intent to buy 675 Barnes and Noble stores, Riggio