Leon Wieseltier, the New Republic’s literary editor, is one of the winners of this year’s Dan David Prize, an award given to people who have made “contributions to humanity.” He will split the award’s $1 million with his fellow winner, the French philosopher Michel Serres.

n+1 has posted a NSFW poem by Valery Nugatov titled “Love. Of Art.”

Jonah Lehrer received $20,000 from the Knight Foundation to give a talk yesterday on plagiarism, a topic with which he is familiar. Slate’s Daniel Engber said the speech “broke nearly every rule of propriety and good taste,” and suggests that Lehrer hasn’t

After listening to Rachel Kushner read at Bookforum’s New Museum event on Tuesday, Choire Sicha is exhorting his readers to pre-order copies of Kushner’s forthcoming novel, The Flamethrowers. (We second his advice.)

The New York Times has reported that Time Warner is in early talks toshed most of its Time Inc. magazine titles—which include People, InStyle, and Real Simple.

At Salon, Ben Nugent argues that novelists like Jeff Eugenides and Ben Lerner have found a new tactic for avoiding the saccharine language that’s often associated with writing about love. These writers “get away with great

Camilla Long’s scathing review of Rachel Cusk’s memoir Aftermath has won the annual “Hatchet Job of the Year” award. In little more than a thousand words, Long characterizes Cusk as “a brittle little dominatrix” and the book as a "vague literary blah, a needy, neurotic mandolin solo of reflections on child sacrifice and asides about drains." Ouch.

Given the rise in “showrooming” (the act of flipping through titles at a local bookstore before going home and buying the books on Amazon) booksellers are beginning to wonder whether charging customers simply to browse is as crazy as it sounds. In

Amid new suspicion that Chilean poet Pablo Neruda may have been poisoned following the coup that overthrew his friend, socialist leader Salvador Allende, a Chilean court has ordered that Neruda’s body be exhumed for a full autopsy. Neruda died twelve days after the 1973 coup, and the cause of death was stated as “extreme malnutrition”—even though Neruda weighed 220 pounds at the time.

Tom Wolfe reportedly nabbed a $7 million advance for his last novel, Back to Blood, but so far, the book has only sold 62,000 copies (not including sales at Walmart and Sam’s Club). Choire Sicha crunches the

Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree, has written a thoughtful story about his friendship with Ghanaian president John Dramani Mahama—a friendship that in recent weeks has been scrutinized by the Ghanaian press. "President John Dramani has been fingered to be in bed with one Mr. Andrew Solomon, a gay lobbyist," one paper has reported. Solomon points out that he has "neither the ability nor the inclination to meddle in foreign elections." But he does express his hope that Mahama will "take a leadership role in the region on L.G.B.T. rights."

Macmillian has agreed to settle a Department

Helen Fielding, the godmother of chick lit, has written a new Bridget Jones novel, which will be published in November by Knopf. Title TBD.

An Idaho state senator has introduced legislation would require high school students to read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, “a novel touted by conservatives like Rep. Paul Ryan and Rush Limbaugh.”

Regan Arthur has been named the publisher and senior vice-presidentof Little, Brown, officially taking the position left open when Michael Pietsch became the CEO of Hachette in September of last year. Arthur, who has worked for Little, Brown since 2001, has edited

New Yorkers, come to the Union Square Barnes and Noble tonight to hear Eileen Myles, Laurie Weeks, Barbara Browning, Vivien Goldman, Johanna Fateman, and Justin Vivian Bond read from the new Feminist Press book Pussy Riot! A Punk Prayer for Freedom. For more on l’affaire Pussy Riot, read Sara Marcus’s consideration of the book.

Alan Hollinghurst talks to the blog Gilded Birds about the Uffington White Horse, a prehistoric hill figure in south eastern England and the “first work of art [he] can remember.”

Colm Toibin is teaming up with German director Volker Schlöndorff to co-write a screenplay

After more than two years and $16 million, Hachette Book Group, Penguin and Simon & Schuster have finally debuted Bookish, a website designed to recommend books, share excerpts of new novels, and feature original essays.

At The New Republic, a paean to Barnes & Noble and its ability “to intuit the craving for a bit of bookish culture in the working- and middle-class suburbs” in the late '80s and early '90s: “It’s easy to forget now, but at the time suburban culture had few places that weren’t bars, bowling alleys, or the kind of restaurant where you could drink coffee and smoke for three hours

Washington DC underground music icon Ian Svenonius (and one time “Sassiest Boy in America”) has written his second book, Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ‘n’ Roll Group (Akashic Books), in which he holds seances to cull advice from dead superstars about how to navigate rock’s crooked path. Of course, it’s half a spoof, and allows Svenonius to sound off in his signature style about street gangs, drugs, nostalgia, and many other pressing issues for the aspiring musician—as well as preach his revolutionary anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian ideas. It’s agitprop with a sense of humor. In

Chris Kyle, the author of the bestseller American Sniper, was shot and killed at a shooting range in Texas on Saturday. Kyle’s book recounts his experiences as a Navy SEAL sharp-shooter in Iraq, where he was credited with more than 150 kills. The book also considers his brushes with depression after his return to the US. According to the Times, Kyle had brought his killer, a "troubled veteran," to the shooting range, hoping that a day there might bring the struggling ex-soldier "some relief." For more, read Jeff Stein's review of Kyle's "casually brutal memoir" from our last summer issue.

The

According to a list recently posted on Poynter, Charles “Chip” McGrath is among the staffers who are leaving the New York Times, which recently announced that it will be reducing staff by offering buyouts. McGrath edited the Times’s Sunday Book Review from 1994 until 2003, and has more recently been an arts reporter and reviewer for the paper, recently profiling authors such as Philip Roth and Andrew Solomon.

New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman gets a good look at plans for the Norman Foster-led redesign of the New York Public Library’s flagship branch, and isn’t impressed

Forget sock puppet reviews—writers are now actively soliciting bad Amazon reviews. After his novel Short Bus got an especially excoriating Amazon write-up, Brian Allen Carr decided that rather than getting angry, he’d run with the bad press. The author has announced his “Lone Star” contest, inviting readers to submit their own one-star reviews of his work.

Reports that Islamist insurgents had destroyed thousands of 14th-, 15th-, and 16th-century manuscripts in the Malian city of Timbuktu may have been exaggerated. Although Timbuktu mayor Hallé Ousmane Cissé told the media earlier this week