Sotheby’s held a literary auction on Tuesday, and a handful of sales exceeded the auction house’s wildest expectations. Among the notable transactions, a first edition of Montaigne’s 1595 collection Les Essays went for $125,000 (it was estimated to sell for between $10,000 and $20,000); a little-known F. Scott Fitzgerald book, Flappers and Philosophers, went for $118,750 (far more than the anticipated $60,000); and a lot that included an early short story and twenty-one letters by David Foster Wallace went for $125,000—well above the predicted $10,000 to $15,000. One of the rare items that

“The rich kids have better gas masks”; “pepper spray is good for your skin”: as protesters camp out in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, novelist Elif Shafak heads to Gezi Park to read the revolutionary writing on the walls.

“We are entering a new golden age of magazine publishing,” trumpets the summer issue of Port Magazine, though to judge that issue by its cover, very little seems new about either the magazine or our current age of publishing. Of the six editors featured, none are women, and there are only two female contributors in the entire magazine.

Meanwhile, the Atlantic adds to its growing

At the London Review of Books blog, Charles Hartman reflects on what it feels like when a poet discovers that one of his poems has been plagiarized.

The Library of Congress is expected to announce this week that Natasha Trethewey will spend another year as the national Poet Laureate. According to the New York Times, in addition to working on a memoir and also serving as the poet laureate of her home state of Mississippi, Trethewey will spend the year travelling around the country and writing “a series of reports exploring societal issues through poetry that are to appear on ‘The PBS NewsHour.’”

Philip Gourevitch worked as a bear-skinner, Cynthia Ozick at an accounting firm, and Tobias Wolff as a farmhand—New Yorker contributors reflect on their summer jobs.

Kevin Barry has won the International Dublin IMPAC Award for his novel City of Bohane. Barry beat out Michel Houellebecq, Karen Russell, and Haruki Murakami for the $130,000 prize.

Documentarian Ken Burns has announced that he is going to film a six-hour adaptation of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. Burns was inspired to do the project by the memory of his mother, who died of cancer

Taking a cue from Occupy Wall Street, more than fifteen Turkish publishers (including Sel Publishing House, which has previously faced obscenity charges for publishing books by William Burroughs) have stepped up to donate books to an impromptu library that’s being assembled in Gezi Park—the site of Turkey’s peaceful anti-government protests.

The manuscript of Samuel Beckett’s novel Murphy has only been seen by several people other than the author himself, but it’s expected to sell for over a million dollars when it goes up for auction next month. In addition to notes and “extensive corrections,”

A.M. Holmes beat out Kate Atkinson, Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, and a handful of other worthy contenders to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction yesterday at a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall in London. After receiving the £30,000 prize for her novel May We Be Forgiven, Holmes noted that this was “the first book award I've won." This might also be the last time the award is given under this name: Beginning next year, the prize will be known as the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, thanks to a three-year sponsorship from the liquer company.

Contrary to the way it is depicted in the new film

In 1936, James Agee, accompanied by Walker Evans, took a commission from Fortune to write a long essay about sharecroppers in the rural South. The piece came in late and long—it ended up being around 30,000 words—and was never published, though it became the basis for Agee’s 1941 classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. After being lost for decades, the manuscript was discovered, and is being published this week in its entirety by Melville House. For more on the book as a literary and journalistic artifact, read John Jeremiah Sullivan’s masterful essay on Cotton Tenants in the summer issue of

For the next three years, Baileys liquor will sponsor what used to be known as the Orange Prize. The British-based prize awards nearly $46,000 to the year’s best female fiction writer. This year’s prize will be announced on Monday, and though Hilary Mantel is rumored to be the favorite, she’s up against stiff competition: Zadie Smith, Barbara Kingsolver, Kate Atkinson, and A.M. Holmes are also in the running.

Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda died nearly forty years ago. His body was exhumed about two months ago, and yesterday, a Chilean judge ordered police to find the man who may have poisoned

As anti-government protests rippled across Turkey, Elif Batuman went out into the streets to report on the occupation of a small park in the European neighborhood of Taksim by peaceful protesters. "This morning, forty thousand demonstrators are said to have crossed the Bosphorus Bridge from the Asian side of the city, to lend support in Taksim. Hundreds of backup police are reportedly being flown into Istanbul from all around the country... On my street, spirits seem to be high. Someone is playing 'Bella, Ciao' on a boom-box, and I can hear cheering and clapping. But every now and then the

Thirteen-year-old Arvind Mahankali, a resident of New York, won the National Spelling Bee on Thursday for correctly spelling 'knaidel': a small mass of leavened dough.

Don Share has been named editor of Poetry Magazine, a position he will take over from Christian Wiman. A published poet and senior editor of the magazine, Share will be the twelth editor in Poetry’s 101-year history.

On Wednesday, Feminist Press and NYU's Fales Library released The Riot Grrl Collection, an assemblage of ephemera from the feminist underground punk movement that took hold in the nineties. The book was launched

In a letter that recently went on sale in England, Rudyard Kipling admits that he may have borrowed sections of his story collection The Jungle Book from forgotten sources. Dated 1895 and addressed only to “madam,” Kipling writes, “it is extremely possible that I have helped myself promiscuously but at present cannot remember from whose stories I have stolen.” Dealer Andrusier Autographs is selling the Kipling letter for about $3,700.

The city of London has begun its search for the first-ever Young Poet Laureate.

Next year, the National Book Critics Circle will add best debut book to its list

What Happened to Sophie Wilder, The Group, and The Best of Everything: The Awl rounds up the best recommended reading for newly minted college grads.

Inspired by sites like Groupon and Gilt, Amazon and other online booksellers have started experimenting with flash sales for e-books, cutting prices by up to two-thirds for a day or two and featuring them on homepages. The strategy has been a major boon for publishers, and “at HarperCollins, executives said they have seen books designated as daily deals go from 11 copies sold in one day, to 11,000 copies the next.”

In an essay for Britain’s