Poet and essayist Adrienne Rich has died at at her home in Santa Cruz of complications from long-term rheumatoid arthritis. Here is a 2002 profile of Rich, and a full bibliography at the Poetry Foundation.

Less than a month after Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes bought The New Republic, the nearly century-old magazine has brought down its online paywall.

David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King is about to be released as a paperback—with four previously unpublished scenes. PWxyz reveals what the new material is about, and what it adds to the posthumous book.

An argument over the relative merits

The Observer's Rozalia Jovanovic writes up Choire Sicha's inaugural column for Bookforum—an investigation into the life and tweets of "cultural truffle hound" and MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach. "While Mr. Biesenbach’s celebrity obsession is not exactly news," Jovanovic writes, "Mr. Sicha does remind us that it does still make us a tad uncomfortable to see the curator at one of the world’s top institutions getting into the pit with the rest of us."

Paris Review editor Sadie Stein has become the editor of the magazine's Daily blog. Stein is replacing senior editor Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn,

After eight years at the helm of Vice, former editor Jesse Pearson left the magazine in 2010 with relatively little fanfare. But come September, Pearson is preparing to return to the magazine world with Exploded View Quarterly, a new publication aiming to fall somewhere in the “center of the lit-mag spectrum—neither a twee indie journal tailored to precious 20-somethings nor a highbrow M.F.A.-department circular.” The quarterly is co-founded by hardcore musician and writer Sam McPheeters, who just published his first novel, The Loom of Ruin.

Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk is doing fine

Renowned Italian novelist Antonio Tabucchi died last night of cancer at his home in Lisbon at the age of 68. Tabucchi, who has been in the running several times as a possible Nobel Prize contender, is the author of more than two dozen books, seven of which have been translated into English. His most famous novel is 1994’s Pereira Declares, about the struggle against fascism in Portugal. Read an excerpt of Tabucchi's 1997 novel The Missing Head here.

Jeanettte Winterson explains what she calls the “asymmetrical” literary judgment between men and women: “If Henry Miller writes Tropic of Cancer

Brian McGreevy’s eccentric mystery novel Hemlock Grove—which will be published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux later this month—is going to be adapted into a Netflix original series.

In Lapham’s Quarterly, Simon Winchester details the mysterious origins and long gestation of the Dictionary of American Regional English, which was started in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1965 and only recently was fully completed.

New York City police confiscated a brand-new Occupy Wall Street Library in Union Square on Wednesday. Activists had rebuilt the library by 7pm, and police took it down by 10pm, prompting a

Meehan Crist and Tim Requarth highlight some problems with Jonah Lehrer’s theory of creativity, and explain why his “mash-up” technique of arguing through anecdotes and science reporting falls flat in his new book, Imagine. As they note: “If dubious interpretations of scientific data appeared only once in Imagine, it might be a worrisome fluke; but they appear multiple times, which is cause for real concern.”

After a raucous book party and drunken agreement, the New York Observer goes on a New Jersey pilgrimage with Gideon Lewis-Kraus. On a related note, here’s a survey of the history of travel

An in-house scoop: Bookforum editor Chris Lehmann has informed us that the ink has dried on his book deal with Metropolitan Books. The working title of Lehmann’s latest—a follow-up to his 2010 Rich People Things—is The Money Cult and will be edited by Sara Bershtel. Lehmann says the book is “an effort to account for the missing reform tradition in American Protestantism, while also accounting for the more irrational, quasi-spiritual features of our civic worship of the market economy.” Lehmann adds: "I'm delighted to be taking this project on, since it combines two long-standing obsessions.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq may be winding down, but military memoirs written by former soldiers—such as Chris Kyle’s bestseller American Sniper—are gaining momentum. “I’ve been doing these kinds of books for 15 years, but it’s not until recently that they have really taken off,” said Marc Resnick, an executive editor at St. Martin’s Press, told the New York Times. The paper notes that the last time this genre was so big was in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

Why isn’t Mike Daisey like John D’Agata? Simple, says Slate: Because Daisey wasn’t up front with his audience—or his editors. At

Reading the debates over Mike Daisey’s deviations from the facts onThis American Life, do you ever get the sense that we’ve been here before?

Harper’s has hired Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn as their new senior reviews editor. Foley-Mendelssohn, who currently works at the Paris Review, comes to Harper’s via The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

Have you ever wondered how top-shelf chefs manage to run their restaurants and find time to publish cookbooks and memoirs? Simple: They use “food ghosts” and “writer-cooks.”

At the NYRB, Bookforum contributor Eric Banks weighs in on the New

Charles McGrath reports on a question that literary journalists and editors have been asking for years: Who will replace Robert Silvers as the editor of the New York Review of Books? The answer probably won't be coming anytime soon: According to Silvers, the question of who will succeed him is “not one that is presenting itself.”

The recent fact/fiction/journalism debates have focused mostly on John D’Agata’s book About a Mountain, but it also hit radio waves last week after it was revealed that This American Life’s most popular episode ever—about the conditions of workers at an Apple factory

Amanda Knox, the American student who was accused of murdering her British roommate in Italy, has signed a seven-figure book deal with HarperCollins, but she won’t have the first word. Raffaele Sollecito, Knox’s former boyfriend, has sold his own book about the murder trial and acquittal, the not-so-subtly titled Presumed Guilty: My Journey to Hell and Back with Amanda Knox, to Simon & Schuster. Sollecito’s book will appear this fall, clearly looking to get a jump on Knox’s title, due out sometime next year.

Congratulations to Artforum on releasing its fantastic new iPhone app! Everybody should

Before there was John D’Agata, there was Truman Capote. Jack Shafer writes: “Both love ‘real’ facts, but when blocked by journalistic convention from the literary effects they desire, they willingly leapt that fence to create whatever rules they needed to enhance their work.” The difference between them, however, is that while Capote steadfastly resisted suggestions that some of his journalism was fictionalized (despite ample evidence to the contrary), D’Agata is up front about blurring genres, and gets around the problem of fact-bending by calling himself an “essayist.”

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