What inspires people to start a literary magazine these days? That’s the question the Observer posed to the editors of the American Reader, which celebrated its first issue last week with a flashy launch party in the West Village. With a masthead featuring Ben Marcus, Dean Young, Jeff Dolven, Scott Hamrah, the magazine, whose editor in chief is the 25-year-old Uzoamaka Maduka, is off to a promising start.

Speaking of holiday publishing parties, New York media celebrated itself (and the joys of gin) at the annual Gin Mingle at Housing Works on Tuesday. While most details of the evening were

CreateSpace has announced the 2013 Amazon “Breakthrough Novel” contest. Any unpublished or self-published work of fiction is eligible. The company will start accepting submissions in January, and winners of the Grand Prize and the First Prize will receive, among other things, “a full publishing contract with Amazon Publishing to market and distribute your Manuscript as a published book.”

On the occasion of the Oxford American’s 79th issue—and the first edited by new EIC Roger Hodge—Dwight Garner reassesses the magazine’s role over the past twenty years and it’s origins as “The New Yorker with

New York Magazine runs a seven-page profile of Chris Hughes, the 29-year-old Facebook co-founder and recently seated owner of the New Republic. While his mission for the magazine isn’t totally clear yet, he does intend to be more hands-on, and to distance himself from his internet roots. “Hughes wants to produce what thoughtful people ought to read,” writes Carl Swanson, “as opposed to churning out what most people like to ‘like.’”

Rupert Murdoch’s iPad-only magazine The Daily has folded. Alexis Madrigal speculates about why the virtual general-interest magazine never managed to get off the

Amazon’s Larry Kirshbaum has been promoted to head all of the company’s U.S. publishing endeavors, just as the company prepares to launch a new publishing arm in Europe.

The Guardian unveils its list of the year’s top women in publishing, giving props to Hilary Mantel, E.L. James, J.K. Rowling, Amanda Hocking, Julia Donaldson, and Kate Mosse. Nice list, though we have to ask: What about Katherine Boo, Sheila Heti, Lisa Cohen, or Cheryl Strayed?

A down-and-out church in Boston is considering selling a first edition of the first book published in America to pay for the church's upkeep. The Bay

New Yorkers: the first meeting of the Public TransLit Book Club will be held on Dec. 11 at the Lolita Bar on Broome Street. And what’s the TransLit club? It’s a mass-commuter reading group (a variation of Seattle’s Books on the Bus Club) in which participating straphangers read designated books. The inaugural book will be Andy Greenberg’s book on WikiLeaks, This Machine Kills Secrets.

Kevin Powers has won the Guardian’s first-book award for Yellow Birds, his novel about a gunner in Iraq. Powers spent two years serving with the army in Iraq, and took the title of his novel from a marching song

The Observer crashes Tao Lin’s graduate seminar on the short story, and gets pretty much what you’d expect: a discussion of George Saunders and casual prescription-drug use.

Despite how many books are being published these days, writers and publishers are often bad at promoting them, argues Impossible Mike at HTML Giant. But then, precisely because of the number of books coming out, most forms of advertising don’t seem to work: traditional promotion is often ignored, and social media is overrated. “I’m just wondering,” he writes, “what the hell is the best way to sustainably advertise books?

Simon and Schuster is going to become the first of the Big Six publishers to get into self-publishing. The house announced today that it’s working with the Indiana-based company Author Solutions Inc. to launch a new self-publishing imprint called Archway Publishing.

Why do so many great books have bad endings? It could be the need to wind down a plot, a latent conservatism. Or, as Joan Acocella speculates, it could be because the author simply is tired.

In an interview on NPR's Fresh Air, Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel reflects on the status of executions in sixteenth-century England (they

Peter McCarthy, a former executive for Random House and Penguin, considers the differing cultures of the two houses, and weighs the potential pitfalls of the merger.

At The Wall Street Journal, Jami Attenberg—the author of a new novel in which a woman's obesity "is tearing her family apart"—writes about food in fiction, and wonders: “When does food become more than just the thing your character is putting in her mouth?”

Did a former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary secretly remove thousands of words with foreign origins and blame the omissions on previous editors? Yes, according to

Is Amazon quietly marking up the prices of physical books? The New York Times notes that a number of new books that were previously discounted are now being sold at list prices.

Before he died, Maurice Sendak spoke with the Believer about publishing houses, “the bullshit of innocence,” and his thoughts on e-books: “I hate them. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of book. A book is a book is a book.”

Under a new pilot program, JSTOR is providing free access to all of its journals and archives to Wikipedia’s top one

A Wikipedia entry suggests that someone knew about Petraeus's affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, as early as January 2012.

The best kind of bad sex is the kind you only have to read about. (And can laugh at without offending anybody). With that in mind, everybody should be excited about the Literary Review of London’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Eight finalists for the 2012 award were announced on Tuesday, with J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy noticeably absent, despite its use of phrases like “miraculously unguarded vagina.” Writers who did make the list include Ben Masters,

Do you enjoy page-turning simulation that happens when you "flip" through a book on an e-reader? If so, we hope you own an iPad, because under a patent that was granted this week, Apple now owns the exclusive rights to that effect.

If fundraising efforts work out, a very low-budget adaptation of Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel may be coming to a theater near you.

The San Francisco-based literary magazine McSweeney's has commissioned writer Richard Parks to write an hour-long radio drama about Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne. Well, sort of: The event will be a "continuous-play

In the first extensive interview since he revealed that has stopped writing fiction, Philip Roth talks to the New York Times about what he’s doing with all his free time (”Every morning I study a chapter in iPhone for Dummies...”), the process of working with biographer Blake Bailey, and the Post-it note that motivates him to enjoy his retirement.

When he decided to publish his new book with Amazon, bestselling author Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Body) knew that he’d have trouble getting bookstores to carry it. So, with the book coming out soon, Ferriss is taking a more unorthodox route to