England’s Minister of Culture has barred singer Kelly Clarkson from leaving the country with a ring that once belonged to Jane Austen, claiming that the item is a significant part of England’s cultural history. Clarkson bought the ring at auction last year for over $200,000, and it is one of three existing pieces of jewelry known to have belonged to the writer. A temporary export ban is in place until September 30, and may be extended until the end of the year.

Stephen King is not only a brand, but the head of a literary dynasty: The New York Times profiles the King clan, which includes five

Because the target audience for Boris Kachka’s history of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux is, well, people who work in publishing, publisher Simon and Schuster has made it clear that if professional book people want to read Hothouse, they’re going to have to pay for it. In a glossy brochure sent out this week, Simon and Schuster announced that “since your requests for Hothouse have left us (gratefully) overwhelmed, we’ve instituted a No Free Copies policy–even if your name’s in the book.”

Westbourne Press, a small publisher based in the UK, is pushing up the publication date of Reza Aslan’s Zealot

Publishing Perspectives profiles South Korea’s Paju Bookcity—a 24-year-old, 10,000-person town near the border of South Korea that’s inhabited almost exclusively by book-industry employees. “It is as if the book trade has been reduced to a giant board game, laid out on quiet, tree-lined streets, interspersed with wooden benches. It is also a little like walking around a book kibbutz.”

Mary Gaitskill talks with Slant about the contemporary obsession with moms, the ascent of internet porn, and her forthcoming novel, which is “about a young girl learning to ride a horse.”

At the Paris Review

Amazon and Overstock.com fell into a pricing war last Thursday after Overstock ran an ad campaign announcing that it would mark all book prices down ten percent lower than Amazon’s for one week only. Not to be outdone, Amazon then knocked down its book prices, in some cases as much as 50 to 65 percent. As the Christian Science Monitor observes, “it's only the latest skirmish in the drama that has become the e-book pricing wars.”

At the New Yorker, Gary Shteyngart gets to take Google Glass out for a test run.

An opera written by Margaret Atwood about the life of Canadian writer, poet, and

Lydia Davis, Jonathan Franzen, Paul Harding, and Justin Torres share their favorite opening lines of novels.

Contrary to Wall Street expectations, Amazon came up short on predicted second-quarter earnings last week, making $7 million less than the quarter before. But Jeff Bezos isn’t concerned. As Forbes reports, though there was a small dip in Amazon’s stock, “this kind of thing isn’t unusual for Amazon, as the company’s margins tend to be razor-thin.”

In honor of the centenary of Roald Dahl’s birth in 2016 (the author died in 1990) UK publisher John Murray will be publishing a collection

MIT and JSTOR have convinced a federal court to delay the release of 8,000 Secret Service documents detailing the investigation that led to criminal charges against the late internet activist Aaron Swartz. The first batch of documents were supposed to be released on July 20, but thanks to the motion, they’re now expected to be ready in late August. Both organizations say that they need more time to redact the names of employees and descriptions of their computer networks. A U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., approved the release of the documents earlier this month following a Freedom of

If the phrases “d’you think,” “panting slightly,” and “strode back” all appear in a novel by an author you’ve never heard of, there’s a chance J.K. Rowling wrote the book. At Yahoo, Chris Wilson locates the “15 stylistic fingerprints that link The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith to four novels by J. K. Rowling.”

During a meeting with his lawyer in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport on Wednesday, Edward Snowden was given a change of clothes and some reading material. In additional to several shirts and a new pair of jeans, Antatoly Kucherena brought Snowden a copy of Crime and Punishment.

Back in the early days of his career, while working as an in-house reader at publisher Jonathan Cape, James Lasdun passed on a novel by an unknown author named “Jane Somers.” Unfortunately for him, “Jane Somers” turned out to be Doris Lessing, and the incident was quickly turned into a cautionary tale for publishers, and a major embarrassment for Lasdun. After decades of avoiding Lessing’s writing, Lasdun recounts how the incident has haunted him through the years—and how he has finally come around to reading her.

According to the New Republic, the literary equivalent of the hip-hop West

FSG's Work in Progress blog has asked six Farrar, Straus, and Giroux authors—Frank Bidart, Nicola Griffith, Jesse Bering, Maureen McLane, Carle Phillips, and Chris Adrian—"what books spoke to them when they were coming out." The answers are fantastic, and so is the Frank Bidart poem "Queer," printed here in full. (Related: Bidart, whose author photo was apparently taken by James Franco, is reviewed at Bookforum.com here.)

The news that Lonely Planet is laying off more than a third of its editorial staff has led to a sad but kind of cool new Twitter hashtag, #lpmemories. Current and former

Could Amazon become the victim of its own success? At Salon, Evan Hughes argues that if the internet behemoth puts bookstore chains out of business, then readers will have a hard time learning about new books. Hughes points out that surveys indicate that “roughly 60 percent of book sales—print and digital—now occur online. But buyers first discover their books online only about 17 percent of the time. Internet booksellers specifically, including Amazon, account for just 6 percent of discoveries. Where do readers learn about the titles they end up adding to the cart on Amazon? In many cases, at

Glenn Greenwald, the Brazil-based Guardian journalist who has been working with Edward Snowden and report on the NSA security leaks, just signed a deal with Metropolitan to write a book about about NSA surveillance. The book, which is slated to come out in March 2014, will “contain new revelations exposing the extraordinary cooperation of private industry and the far-reaching consequences of the government’s program, both domestically and abroad.”

Researchers in Belgium have discovered that infusing bookstores with a subtle smell of chocolate encourages shoppers to stick around longer.

As the publishing world reels from the fact that J.K. Rowling published a book under a male pseudonym, Flavorwire’s Jason Diamond reminds us that Don DeLillo also did a little gender-bending with Amazons, a book about hockey he wrote under the name Cleo Birdwell. (For more on that, read Gerald Howard's Bookforum piece on the novel).

Rolling Stone courted controversy this week by publishing an issue with Boston Marathon bomber Dzhohkar Tsarnaev on the cover looking rumpled and Jim Morrison-esque. The cover was immediately denounced by the media—and by CVS, which has refused to stock this