Lorin Stein considers the reasons that "short stories fell off our radar"—and explains the important role they play in his life now.

While the rest of the East Coast was preparing for Hurricane Sandy, the Supreme Court convened on Monday to hear a case that's likely to have serious implications for international publishers and book pirates. Publisher John Wiley & Sons took student Supap Kirtsaeng to court this year after catching the Thai graduate student selling international textbooks online. These textbooks, while nearly identical to American ones, are significantly cheaper, and have netted

Yesterday, executives from Random House and Penguin announced their plans to combine the two companies. The combination, which will be called Penguin Random House, will, the two companies hope, "be better able to deal with the digital transformation of the book industry." The Wall Street Journal also points out that the decision comes at a time when Penguin is still fighting the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust suit, which alleged price-fixing on e-books.

Well, the worst of Hurricane Sandy has passed, and New York is now assessing the damage. So how are things looking on the indie

Is Rupert Murdoch planning to buy Penguin? Last week it was reported that the publishing giant was in talks about merging with Random House (a deal which would “create a combined entity that would control nearly 25 percent of the United States book market”), but this weekend, news emerged that News Corporation will likely make a bid on Pearson, Penguin’s parent company, for around £1 billion. Murdoch already owns HarperCollins, one of the other “big six” publishers.

J.K. Rowling and Hilary Mantel have both taken the UK government to task for rolling back welfare benefits. In a recent interview,

The Financial Times reports that Penguin and Random House—two of the “big six” publishers—are in talks about merging. Pearson, which owns Penguin, confirmed on Thursday that they have been meeting with Bertelsmann, which owns Random House, about the possibility of a consolidation that would “give Bertlesmann more than a 50 percent stake in the mega-publishing company that would form.” But according to Pearson, this is not a done deal: “the two companies have not reached agreement and there is no certainty that the discussions will lead to a transaction.”

Why do American novelists take so long

Restructuring at Simon and Schuster means that all of the publisher’s imprints will be lumped into one of four groups: Atria, Scribner, the Gallery, or the Jonathan Karp-led Simon & Schuster. It also means that at the Free Press—which is being folded into the Simon and Schuster group—publisher Martha Levin and editor-in-chief Dominick Anfuso have lost their jobs.

Dissent has launched its snazzy new website.

In a characteristically frank conversation with the Huffington Post, publisher Benedikt Taschen discusses the books that have lost him the most money—including books on Diego Rivera’s

Fran Lebowitz might be getting her own HBO talk show.

Wayne Koestenbaum is a cultural critic, poet, novelist, and Bookforum contributor. And now we can add "painter" to that list. This month, the New York gallery White Columns will show about fifty of Koestenbaum’s artworks, including “some brightly colored self-portraits and a smattering of male nudes.” Speaking to the Observer, Koestenbaum said he paints "in the |“I am nervous about showing the work publicly,” Mr. Koestenbaum admitted. “I’m also entirely ecstatic.|mood| of Joe Brainard or John Wesley, but with the procedure and crazy intensity

At the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, legendary publisher Robert Gottlieb predicts upcoming plot twists on Girls by re-reading bestsellers from the ’60s: “We don’t know yet how things will work out for the girls of Girls ... but if it follows tradition, at least one of them will rise to the professional top, having sacrificed True Love; one will marry the nice guy next door and settle down to domestic contentment, if not bliss; and the one who Went Bad will die tragically—in the old days, of alcohol or a car crash or suicide, perhaps today of a transmitted social disease.”

In honor of Chinese

Following the disclosure by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency of the full gamut of drug-abuse charges against cyclist Lance Armstrong, a bookstore in Glasgow has elected to reshelve his memoir, Every Second Counts, in their fiction section. Moby Lives is calling upon other bookstores to do the same.

How a book of lectures about the Industrial Revolution became the inspiration for the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games: screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce tells the Telegraph about how “its most striking images—an industrial powerhouse rising before your eyes, a green hill disgorging workers

If you missed our panel at the New School on Monday—the one with Lynne Tillman, Sheila Heti, Émilie Notéris, and Wendy Delorme, and Chris Kraus—you can read all about it at Capital New York.

In spite of all the muscle they’ve put behind their publishing imprint, Amazon is having a tough time getting their books on bestseller lists. Amazon’s big fall release, a memoir by actress Penny Marshall, sold only seven thousand copies during its first four weeks of sales—in part because it wasn’t stocked in any Barnes and Noble stores, or any big-box chains. Nor was it on shelves in most independent

In response to Johnny Depp's new line of books, Laura Miller asks: Are boutique publishing imprints for celebrities going to be the literary equivalent of endorsing a fragrance?

After accepting her second Booker Prize on Tuesday, Hilary Mantel announced that her novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies are not only serving as the inspiration for a six-part BBC series, but are also being adapted for the stage.

Chuck Wendig offers some tips about how “not to suck” at a writers’ conference.

Along with the thousands of publishers, writers, and literary agents that turned up for last week’s

Hilary Mantel has become the first woman to win the Man Booker Prize twice. Mantel was awarded the Booker on Tuesday for Bring Up the Bodies, the second installment in her trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, and the sequel to her novel Wolf Hall, which won the Booker in 2009. The only other authors to win the award twice are J.M. Coetzee and Peter Carey.

Despite his near-rock-star popularity outside of Japan, Haruki Murakami has delivered only one reading in his home country. He doesn't do TV or radio interviews there, and he won't appear on the cover of magazines. "In short, Murakami in Japan is a

A suitcase full of tens of thousands of previously unpublished documents by Franz Kafka might soon be made public, thanks to a recent ruling by a Tel Aviv judge. The papers—which include Kafka’s notebooks and letters—have been under dispute since the death of their final owner in 2007. Kafka left the papers to his executor after his death in 1924, and in 1939, Max Brod transported them to Palestine, where he left them to his secretary, who bequeathed them to her daughters. Despite protests from the daughters, this week’s ruling was made on the grounds that Brod stipulated in his will that his