How does a book end up reviewed in both the New York Times Book Review and the newspaper’s Arts section, while the the book’s author is writing essays for the paper (and sometimes even being profiled for it)? New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan explains how Times fiefdoms divide their assignments: “The Times’s three staff book critics—Michiko Kakutani, Janet Maslin and Dwight Garner—make their own decisions about what to review. They do so without regard to, or knowledge of, what the editors of the Sunday Book Review, a separate entity, may have assigned or have planned.”

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At The Millions, Ben Greenman explains how he often comes to understand his own book projects by discovering paintings that share the book’s spirits.

In celebration of World Book Night, the publishing industry will give away 500,000 books including Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaiden’s Tale, Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist and Willa Cather’s My Antonia at selected events across the country tonight.

Instead of heading to the William Gaddis archives at Washington University to dig through the writer’s papers, Matthew Erickson decided to go hunting for Gaddis’s ‘realia’—”that archival category of

Was Amanda Knox a cunning murderer, a “mouse in a cat’s game,” or simply a young American who was ensnared by the labyrinthine Italian legal system? The new memoir by the American exchange student who was convicted of murdering her roommate while studying abroad in Italy is both a case for her innocence and a bildungsroman, writes Michiko Kakutani.

Benjamin Schwarz, who has edited the Atlantic's books and ideas section since 2000, has left the magazine, and been replaced by longtime Slate editor Ann Hulbert.

At Poetry, Laura Sims introduces a feature in which she will publish selected

Last week, Gary Shteyngart announced to the world via Twitter that he had finally finished Middlemarch. “I DID IT!!! I FINISHED MIDDLEMARCH!!! All you haters out there said I couldn't finish a book that long, but I did! HA HA HA! DOROTHEA 4EVER! P.S. Next I might read another long Britishy book like David Copperstein or whatever.” When interviewed about the accomplishment for the Daily News, Shteyngart told the paper, “I am never going to the Midlands.”

The Digital Public Library of America—which “brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely

Flavorwire has posted the first page of Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Bleeding Edge.

It’s been a good week for Zadie Smith. In addition to making Granta’s list of the Best Young British Novelists and getting shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Smith was just shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje prize.

David Mamet is going to self-publish his next book.

For reasons nobody can explain, government officials in George Orwell’s birthplace of Bihar, India, are turning the writer’s former home into a monument—for Mahatma Ghandi. The house in Motihari City was damaged

Just in time for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the LAT has rolled out an interactive map of literary Los Angeles.

There’s stiff competition this year for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize). The shortlist includes Barbara Kingsolver, Kate Atkinson, AM Homes, Maria Semple, and Zadie Smith.

The Boston police weren’t the only ones to consider the Boston Marathon as a possible terrorist target. In 2002, novelist writer Tom Lonergan published Heartbreak Hill: The Boston Marathon Thriller, which came with this description: “The trouble with most terrorists

Are American univesity departments allergic to political activists? Christopher Shea considers why anthropologist, author (The Democracy Project), and Occupy organizer David Graeber has been unable to get an academic job in the U.S.

Ned Beauman, Zadie Smith, Adam Thirlwell, and David Szalay—as well as newcomers like Jenni Fagan, Xiaolu Guo, Joanna Kavenna and Ross Raisin—make Granta’s once-in-a-decade list of the Best Young British Novelists.

Simon and Schuster is teaming up with the New York Public Library to launch an e-book lending program that will allow the library complete access to

The 2013 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced. Adam Johnson (The Orphan Master's Son) wins for fiction, Sharon Olds (Stag's Leap) wins for poetry, and more...

Hundreds of Haruki Murakami fans waited overnight outside bookstores in Tokyo to get early copies of his latest novel, Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. According to a review in Asahi Shimbun, the novel is about “a man who tries to overcome his sense of loss and isolation." The Guardian elaborates: “at high school, protagonist Tsukuru Tazaki had four close friends whose names represented different colours. His did not, and at university he was rejected by his friends. Now 36, Tazaki is looking back on his empty, colourless life.”

After visiting the Anne Frank Museum, Justin

Congratulations to the recipients of the 2013 Guggenheim fellowships, who include Colson Whitehead, Rachel Kushner, J.C. Hallman, Michael Lesy, Jennifer Homans, Ben Marcus, and Carlin Romano.

To commemorate James Joyce, the Central Bank of Ireland has minted 10,000 special ten euro coins with the author’s face and a quote from Ulysses printed on them. A nice idea, but too bad they misquoted the book.

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Elaine Showalter traces the literature of American anxiety back to its late 19th-century origins.

We’re a little jealous of the New York Times Magazine

The City of New York has settled with Occupy Wall Street over a lawsuit resulting from the destruction of an OWS library during a police raid last year. According to papers filed by the OWS Library Working Group, the city seized 3,600 books last November, and only returned 1,003 of them. The city has agreed to pay the movement $47,000, and will cover $186,350 in attorney fees.

Todd Field, director of Little Children and In the Bedroom, is adapting Jess Walter’s latest novel, Beautiful Ruins.

Deborah Copaken Kogan contributes a brave and frequently shocking essay to The Nation about her “

Pamela Paul, a features editor at the New York Times Book Review, will replace Sam Tanenhaus as editor of that publication. Tanenhaus, who took over the magazine back in 2004, will now be a writer-at-large for the New York Times, with a focus on “the ideological and historical roots–and emerging character — of today’s roiling political movements.”

Haruki Murakami, Karen Russell, Arthur Phillips, Michel Houellebecq and Julie Otsuka are among the writers on the shortlist for the $130,000 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, which will be announced on June 6.

Dwight Garner singles out three books of