Early reviews of J.K. Rowling’s first adult novel are starting to come in, and they're not good. Meanwhile, over at Amazon, customer reviews were wildly mixed, even though many reviewers admitted tonot having read the book.

A new study finds that 55 percent of books labeled Young Adult are actually purchased and read by people over eighteen. And these readers aren't just people in their early twenties, either—a full 28 percent of all YA books were sold to people between the ages of thirty and forty-four.

To launch his novel Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan is interviewing dozens

The Penguin Group has filed suit against writers Elizabeth Wurtzel, Ana Marie Cox, Rebecca Mead, "Hip-Hop Minister" Conrad Tillard, and Holocaust survivor Herman Rosenblat to recoup tens of thousands of dollars (up to $81,000, in one case) spent on book advances (and interest) for manuscripts that were never turned in.

n+1 has posted an impressive remembrance of Shulamith Firestone, the author of The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, with testimonies from Kate Millet, Chris Kraus, Nina Power, and others.

Could book bloggers be hurting literature? Peter Stothard, a Booker

At the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, Christine Smallwood reflects on Norman Mailer’s brief career as an auteur (he specialized in films that “that bartenders play on silent to create ambiance”) and what it suggests about his fiction.

The real-life inspiration for Tom Sawyer: a hard-drinking, Brooklyn-born, volunteer firefighter.

Is former New Yorker journalist Jonah Lehrer angling for a book deal about his fall from grace? That’s what it sounds like according to an essay in Los Angeles Magazine. "I’m extremely tempted to correct many of the false accusations that have been made about my work

Digital Book World asks: “Can you go to jail for writing a fake book review?”

Okay, we know everybody is sick of hearing all about Naomi Wolf’s Vagina, but you should still make time for the Millions’ "feminist hate-read book club" on the topic. And while you're at it, check out Natasha Vargas-Cooper's takedown of Vagina from our current issue.

Anybody want to buy Tao Lin’s juicer, bed frame, or MacBook? The novelist is running low on cash (he’s awaiting a paycheck from Sarah Lawrence College) and is hoping to make ends meet by selling all his stuff on Twitter.

Yesterday was National

The owners of Village Voice Media are selling all their publications, which include The Village Voice, SF Weekly, the LA Weekly, among others.

Among the things we learned about J.K. Rowling from reading the New Yorker profile of her in this week’s issue are that: she’s worth nine hundred million dollars, she worked for Amnesty International, and is “shy and thin-skinned.” Also, the reason she’s venturing into adult fiction is because “there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy. You don’t have sex near unicorns. It’s an ironclad rule. It’s tacky.”

The first issue of Huffington, the Huffington Post’s new weekly iPad only magazine, is dedicated to literature, and features poetry and fiction by Aimee Bender, John Matthias and

The Brooklyn Book Festival is this Sunday, and like the run-up to the presidential election, it only seems to get bigger every time it comes around. We’ve sifted through the day’s events (all eighty-plus of them) to choose our favorites. If you can only make it to one panel, it should be Bookforum editor Michael Miller talking to LRB editor Christian Lorentzen and novelists Elissa Schappell and Clancy Martin about money in fiction. A full list of events is available here, and our staff picks are below.

10:00 A.M. The London Review of Books presents The Novel and the City.

A conversation about

New Yorkers: If you're not already enrolled in an institution of higher learning (or even if you are) we encourage you to check out the course listings on offer from the Brooklyn Institute. The Institute was started in 2011 as a way of taking liberal arts courses out of the classroom—many of their seminars are conducted in the back room of a Boerum Hill restaurant—and span subjects from Spinoza to Freud to realism in literature. This Fall, they're offering classes on the history, theory, and literature of zombies ("'Zombi' and the Politics of Representation"), a survey on the role of the female

Two weeks ago, Philip Roth took Wikipedia to task in an open letter on the New Yorker’s website for not letting him correct an error in a entry about one of his novels. The alleged error was about the inspiration for The Human Stain, which Roth claims—contrary to Wikipedia—was not based on editor Anatole Broyard. But in another open letter posted on Facebook, Broyard’s daughter responded to Roth, noting that “there was a legitimate reason that many reviewers of the book and movie drew the comparison to my dad’s life.” She added, “I don’t think it’s reasonable that Roth gets to dictate what

In response to protests from writers, artists and scholars, the New York Public Library has altered plans on the $300 million renovation of the flagship Fifth Avenue branch. Rather than move millions of volumes into the library into off-site storage in New Jersey, an $8 million donation has made it possible to build enough storage space in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building to keep 3.3 of the library’s 4.5 million books in the building, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

Film producer Scott Rudin, publishing veteran Frances Coady, and IAC chairman Barry Diller have formed a partnership

A new report by Gartner Research predicts that 10 to 15 percent of all ratings and reviews generated through social media will be fake by 2014—they’ll be written either by the author or somebody with a vested interest in the success of the product. So perhaps this is a good time to pay attention to Galleycat’s roundup of the top customer reviewers on Amazon.

Just in time for the publication of Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Joseph Anton, a radical Iranian organization has raised the bounty on Rushdie’s head from $500,000 to $3.3 million. When reached for comment, Rushdie seemed unperturbed: "I'm

Here's an interview with Lauren Cerand, identified by the Rumpus, Flavorwire, and The Millions as a “need-to-know freelance literary publicist.”

In a tell-all that will be published this week, Joyce Johnson, one of Jack Kerouac’s exes, reminisces about what it was like to date the famously drunk, famously prolific author of On the Road. Among the juicier details to emerge from the book is that, contrary to Kerouac’s claim that he wrote On the Road in a “blast of energy during three weeks in 1951,” the writer actually spent years working on and revising the novel.

Salon excerpts David Byrne’s