Outcry and a debate over the value of academic presses has erupted in response to the University of Missouri’s recent decision to close its publishing house and reinvent it as something different. In an email that went out this week, university officials announced plans to defund the press, and relaunch it as a new publishing operation run by four paid staffers and five grad student interns. In addition to scholarly books, the more than fifty-year-old press has put out collected works by Langston Hughes and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as other general-interest titles.

What do measures to

After months of warning, Larry McMurtry’s Last Book sale is finally under way in Archer City, Texas. The novelist and famed used-book seller is offloading two-thirds of the inventory from his world-renowned bookstore, Booked Up. Even though McMurtry is shedding 300,000 titles, he’s made clear that he has no plans to close the store entirely.

Former State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter has landed a book deal to expand upon her much-discussed essay in The Atlantic about the difficulties women face in balancing their domestic and professional lives. "Why Women Still Can't Have It All”

Guernica and Interview are running excerpts of Cynthia Carr’s excellent new biography of downtown artist David Wojnarowicz (that’s pronounced Voy-nar-o-vitch). And if you haven’t read it already in print, check out Luc Sante’s equally excellent review of the book from our summer issue.

A devotional choral work by sixteenth-century composer Thomas Tallis has raced to the top of the UK classical music charts after getting a mention in the sadomasochistic mommy porn trilogy, 50 Shades of Gray. Meanwhile, at the New York Times, Adam Sternbergh muses about whether it’s creepy to see somebody reading

Graywolf releases the trailer (which is really more of an epic short video) for Josh Cohen's forthcoming book, Four New Messages. "Emission" stars Girls actor Alex Karpovsky, and was directed by Brian Spinks. The book will be out in early August.

A blogger for Boston-based literary journal Ploughshares has been reprimanded for critiquing other publications on the magazine’s website, and retaliated by leaking an email from the magazine managing editor to the Observer. “After some upsetting conversations regarding the nature and tone of the opinions I’ve expressed over my nine posts, the managing

Little, Brown has paid a jaw-dropping seven-figure advance to Australian writer Hannah Kent for her debut novel Burial Rights. Kent, 27, works at the literary magazine Kill Your Darlings. Her novel is about the last woman to be publicly beheaded in 1830.

Twenty years ago, William Gibson wrote a poem, put it on a floppy disk, and coded it to self-destruct after one reading. Now, a PhD student studying cryptology has created a replica of the coded poem and challenged hackers to crack it. To sweeten the deal, whoever does so first will get a complete set of William Gibson books.

To get around

A two-volume e-book claiming to contain images of one hundred previously undiscovered drawings by Caravaggio has been pulled from Amazon in the wake of suspicion over its scholarly legitimacy. While art historians Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz and Adriana Conconi Fedrigolli say that they found the lost sketches at a castle archive in Milan, archivists contended that they had no record of working with the pair. “A serious scholar doesn't produce an e-book,” said former archive director Maria Teresa Fiorio.

Serious scholars may not produce e-books, but apparently the Vatican does.

Neil Gaiman has

After optioning E.L. James’s 50 Shades of Gray last March for a staggering $5 million, Universal and Focus Pictures have finally attached some names to the project: Michael De Luca and Dana Brunetti, who have been hired as producers. The film, however, is still in need of a director. (There’s no word on whether the studios will pick up Bret Easton Ellis, who has been vying for the job via a very enthusiastic Twitter campaign.)

At the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, Michael Cunningham completes his white-knuckled, blow-by-blow account of why the Pulitzer Prize committee failed to award a winner

The Guardian “discovers” literary Brooklyn in a breathless essay that name checks every Brooklyn-based writer from James Agee to Martin Amis, and then goes on to detail their weekly soccer games and favorite coffee shops. For readers without the time or patience to read the article, Moby Lives provides a snarky summary, which ends by naming every Brooklyn author named in this “invaluable work of reportage.”

Nathan Englander beat out Etgar Keret, Sarah Hall and Kevin Barry to win the 25,000 euro Frank O'Connor prize for his short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.

Novelist Patrick Somerville recounts how a critic's misreading got his fourth book panned in the New York Times, and how an email correspondence between one of the novel's characters and a Times editor resulted in a correction. Meanwhile, Publisher's Weekly looks into how much a NYT Book Review write-up really matters in terms of sales.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's brother has revealed that the Colombian writer's career is effectively over due to dementia, The Guardian reported this weekend. Garcia Marquez, now 85 and the author of five novels and dozens of essay and story collections, has been

Oxford University Press has been fined 1.9 million pounds after it was revealed that two of the publisher’s subsidiaries bribed Kenyan and Tanzanian government officials to secure contracts for school textbooks in those countries.

After a "heated auction," Ecco has won the rights to a memoir by U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. The book, tentativey scheduled to be released in 2014, "explores Trethewey’s experience growing up mixed race in the South of the '70s and '80s, her close relationship with her mother, who was later murdered by her stepfather, a Vietnam veteran, and the repercussions

At the Paris Review blog, Clancy Martin recounts a trip to St. Petersburg, which featured shots of vodka, dancing bears, and his own mission to sleep with a Russian “whom he did not have to pay.”

Classic kids show Reading Rainbow was canceled in 2009 after twenty-six years on PBS, but thanks to a new initiative by longtime host LeVar Burton, it’s now reincarnated as an app. The “Reading Rainbow” app, geared toward kids between three and nine, “is just an updated, interactive version of the TV show, one that takes users right to the books instead of just telling them about them.” Burton explains

The Observer investigatives whether tax reasons (as opposed to a pure love of Brooklyn) was behind Martin Amis’s decision to purchase a $2.5 million brownstone in Cobble Hill.

Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style gets the hip-hop video treatment.

HarperCollins CEO Victoria Barnsley tells the media that she has a good feeling about News Corp’s decision to break their news outlets—which includes HarperCollins—into a company separate from its cable-entertainment channels. While Barnsley isn’t sure precisely what the move will mean for HarperCollins, at the company’s annual party last night,