Consider the interrobang. When ad executive Martin Speckter debuted the half question mark-half exclamation point in 1962, the punctuation point earned write-ups in the Wall Street Journal and Time, and was canonized in several American dictionaries. And then it disappeared. The Millions met up with Speckter’s widow to discuss its rise and fall in popularity, and address the question—what happened to the interrobang‽

There’s no point in finishing bad books, but should we feel obligated to finish good ones?

“The Internet,” Harper’s publisher John MacArthur claims in an op-ed, is basically

At htmlgiant, Lily Hoang asks: Is the NEA punishing writers who have published books at BlazeVox, which in some cases has required authors to pay a percentage of their own publishing costs?

A twelve-hundred-page erotic novel some are calling “mommy porn” has landed at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for combined print and ebook fiction. Fifty Shades of Gray, which originated as Twilight fan fiction, reimagines “the Bella and Edward love affair set in contemporary Seattle, Washington, with Bella as the young college graduate virgin and Edward as the masterful billionaire with

Twenty-eight-year-old Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has just bought The New Republic, and has assumed the dual role of the magazine’s publisher and editor-in-chief. Hughes plans to bring the ninety-eight-year-old magazine into the digital age, the New York Times reports, and wants to focus on “distributing the magazine’s long-form journalism through tablet computers like the iPad.”

Gawker chief Nick Denton has a new approach to the “problem” of nasty online comments, he announced today during a panel at South by Southwest. Gawker commenters are notoriously snarky, and reining in “hateful

The National Book Critics Circle presented its awards for the best books of 2011 at a ceremony in Manhattan last night. The fiction prize went to Edith Pearlman for her short story collection Binocular Vision; Maya Jasanoff won in the nonfiction category for Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World; Laura Kasischke won in poetry for Space, in Chains; John Lewis Gaddis's George F. Kennan won best biography; autobiography went to Mira Bartók for The Memory Palace; and the award for criticism went to Geoff Dyer for Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and

For his next project, Bret Easton Ellis is tapping into the lewder side of Hollywood. The American Psycho author is casting boy-next-door porn star James Deen as the lead of his “micro-budget noir movie,” titled The Canyons.

J. Hoberman, recently laid off by the Village Voice, has become a columnist at Tablet.

At Flavorwire, novelist Adam Wilson—author of the bleak suburban comedy Flatscreen—picks the top ten slacker novels, including Iris Owen’s After Claude, Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land, and the New Testament. In Wilson’s view, Jesus was not just a fictional character but also the first literary

Amazon has hired James Atlas—who wrote the definitive biography of Saul Bellow—to edit a new series of biographies called Amazon Lives, with titles scheduled to start appearing in June 2013. Amazon has been steadily preparing to become a powerful publishing presence. The company is clearly set up to sell its own titles online, but how do you sell books published by Amazon in the competition's bookstores (in Barnes and Nobles, for example)? You change the publisher’s name from Amazon Books to New Harvest Books, and you distribute them through another publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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Alexander Star, formerly an editor at Lingua Franca and the New York Times Magazine, is leaving his current position at the New York Times Book Review to become a senior editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

The Awl recounts how in the late 1950s Saul Bellow helped his closest friend get a teaching job—without realizing this so-called friend was sleeping with his wife.

Canada’s National Post is taking a fast and dirty approach to e-books, publishing as many (and as many different kinds) as possible to see what sells.

Timothy McSweeney—after whom Dave Eggers named his notorious literary magazine

Why does Wall Street appear so rarely in fiction? John Lanchester claims it’s because explaining the intricacies of high finance would bog down good storytelling. Explanation, he says, is “fine in small doses, as a dollop of rationale before the main course of drama, but anything longer and the reader wakes hours later to the familiar clanking noise of the milkman delivering bottles to the front door.”

Salman Rushdie will chair this year’s PEN World Voices Festival, and participants will include Martin Amis, Colson Whitehead, and Marjane Satrapi. We were thrilled to see that Elevator Repair

A review of Andrew Breitbart's Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!.

Before his death last December, Christopher Hitchens was known for torching his intellectual adversaries. Vanity Fair interpreted this talent rather literally when they handed out Christopher Hitchens lighters at their Oscar party last weekend. Each quote came engraved with a Hitch quote, including our favorite: “Everyone has a book inside them, which is exactly where I think it should, in most cases, remain.”

Slate launches the inaugural issue of the Slate Book Review today, a monthly review that will publish on the first Saturday of every month.

To protest a bill passed last year in the

In response to the latest VIDA report, Emily Gould posits, at The Awl, an interesting theory about the paucity of women writing or getting reviewed in any of the “top” literary magazines. “Could it be,” she wonders, “that part of the imbalance is caused by the fact that women are choosing not to write for these magazines?”

We just listened to two recent and excellent public-radio interviews, both available online: At L.A.’s Bookworm, host Michael Silverblatt talked with Wayne Koestenbaum about his book Humiliation (which Laura Kipnis wrote about here). And NPR’s Tom Gjelten interviews Timothy

VIDA has released their 2011 count of male-to-female ratios in literary magazines. A quick scroll down the page reveals the usual predominance of red: The color denoting the number of male authors who wrote for, or are reviewed by, publications like The Atlantic, Harper’s, and the TLS. Only two of the publications surveyed were not in the red: the Boston Review (9 women reviewed, 5 men), and Granta (34 women, 30 men; thanks in large part to their summer issue dedicated to feminism). Why does this sound so familiar? Oh, yeah. This year, the disheartening charts are adorned with quotes from