And the winner of the inaugural hatchet-job award is...novelist and critic Adam Mars-Jones who clinched the title with his scathing review of Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall.

Digital Book World puts Random House at the top of its list of “best publishing companies to work for,” but also includes a “sample negative employee review” for each firm surveyed. For example, according to a disgruntled worker at second-place John Wiley & Sons, “You get the impression that the company is run by automatons.”

The Millions judges UK vs. US books by their covers.

Following Felix Salmon’s complaints

New York magazine has named author Kathryn Schulz as their new book critic, filling a position that opened more than a year ago when Sam Anderson left for the New York Times Magazine. Schulz is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, and, apparently not to any professional detriment, refers to herself as the world’s “leading wrongologist.”

Katherine Boo’s highly anticipated and already highly praised account of “life and death in a Mumbai undercity,” Behind the Beautiful Forevers, hits shelves this week. In our Feb/March issue, Jonathan Shainin praised Boo’s first book

Today marks the re-release of William Gaddis’s classics The Recognitions and J R, published in 1955 and 1975, respectively. Once described by Cynthia Ozick as “the most overlooked important work of the last several literary generations,” The Recognitions was a commercial flop when it first came out, prompting a book (Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards!) bemoaning the novel’s weak critical reception. It was only upon the publication of J R, Gaddis’s novel about an eleven-year-old boy “motivated only by good-natured greed,” that Gaddis came into wider success. Still, despite rapturous reviews and

Mimi Alford was nineteen years old when she started interning at the JFK White House in 1962. Four days into the internship, she went swimming with the president, and later that day, Kennedy “‘took her virginity in Mrs. Kennedy’s room.” This is one of the more lurid anecdotes that emerge from Alford’s tell-all about her relationship with the president, which will officially be released on Wednesday, but details of which have already been leaked by the New York Post after they found an early copy in a Manhattan bookstore. Interspersed between Alford’s more scandalous claims—she says Kennedy once

“Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don’t think it’s performing a character, really, if the character you’re performing is yourself. I don’t see that as playing a role. It’s just appearing in public.” The full transcript of Sheila Heti’s interview with Joan Didion is now online.

If the blog network Tumblr were a city, it would have 42 million residents. And cities, of course, need newspapers. To accommodate their growing population, Tumblr is creating a “news site for the things that happen in the Tumblrverse,” and has already hired

According to the New York Daily News, GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has written dozens of Amazon user reviews over the past eight years—enough to earn a “Top Reviewer” rating. And what do the reviews teach us about his tastes? “For one, he really hates the Clintons,” the Daily News says. “He loves a good mystery. He's fascinated with World War II, as well as the Civil War, with a special appreciation for the ‘automatic aggressiveness’ of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.”

German author Bernard Schlink is taking the Weinstein Company to court for not paying him royalties from the film

Barnes & Noble has refused to stock titles from Amazon’s publishing imprint. According to a statement from B&N, the move "is based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent," which the bookstore claims prevents them from “offering certain e-books to our customers.” However, Barnes & Noble’s website will continue to sell books published by Amazon.

The Center for the Art of Translation has posted a video of a Lydia Davis lecture on her translation of Madame Bovary, where she explains how she used Nabokov’s marginalia from one of his copies

"Jonathan Franzen: e-books are damaging society."

At the Paris Review Daily, Avi Steinberg considers the relationship between libraries and pornography, and how the library, “once a hothouse of Eros and a laboratory of realism, has become a burial site.”

Open City author Teju Cole has been appointed the distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Bard College.

NYRB Classic’s blog has posted “Good Morning, Giantess!,” the first story from Robert Walser’s new collection, Berlin Stories.

Investigative journalism organization ProPublica presents its new (and very timely) Tumblr: “Officials Say the Darndest Things.”

What’s the difference between

In a rambling essay published in Russia Free Newspaper, Russian President Vladimir Putin offers a solution for edifying “the dominance of Russian culture” once and for all: an official literary canon. “Let us take a survey of our most influential cultural figures," suggests Putin, "and |Each self-respecting student was required to read 100 books from a specially compiled list of the greatest books of the Western world.|compile a 100-book canon| that every Russian school leaver will be required to read."

What will happen when physical Barnes & Noble bookstores and their hard-copy products

The good news: The Chicago Tribune is getting a new stand-alone, 24-page book review section, and a free sample will be available on Sunday. The bad news: It will cost Tribune subscribers an additional $99 a year to get the review, which is being marketed as "premium content."

Do book bloggers matter? Reed Exhibitions thinks so—they’ve just bought the two year-old Book Blogger Convention as a supplement to BookExpo America (BEA).

Children’s author Maurice Sendak had some very adult things to say about e-books during his loopy appearance on the Colbert Report.

Until he began to work for Amazon’s publishing arm, Larry Kirshbaum was a successful literary agent and a big-time industry insider, a BusinessWeek cover story on Amazon’s foray into book publishing reports. Since defecting to the digital world six months ago, Kirshbaum has signed big-name writers like Timothy