So far we’re enjoying what HTML Giant is calling its Tournament of Bookshit week, a skewed competition that will play out in NCAA-style brackets between literary (and not-so-literary) topics. This year's topics include “magic realism” vs. “living in Brooklyn,” and “talking shit about the New Yorker while submitting frequently to NYer” vs. “dream sequence w/ talking animals.”

And now, for a dissenting view: Margaret Atwood says Twitter inspires people to write better and read more books.

David Guterson has won the bad sex in fiction award.

Why are long-form profiles from 1995 the latest

Writers Elif Batuman and Aminatta Forna, critics Tim Parks and Christopher Ricks, and novelist Yiyun Li will be deciding who wins the 2013 Man Booker International Prize.

If you haven’t been following The Millions’s “Year in Reading” series (which so far has featured Geoff Dyer, Jennifer Egan, Scott Esposito, and John Williams), Benjamin Hale’s list is a good place to start.

Aside from going to recently rent-reduced St. Mark’s Bookshop in person, this photo-essay is the next best thing.

In its round-up of the best book reviews of December, Electric Literature features, ahem, Dennis Lim’s

A copy of the Paris Review signed by Johnathan Franzen, high tea with Jon-Jon Goulian, and a ticket (including plus one) to the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue preview party are three of the offerings up for grabs at the Paris Review auction.

Books in the Hood, the only bookstore in the South Bronx, and the only independent bookstore in the Bronx, period, is set to close later this month.

Publisher John Wiley is partnering with the Forbes media company to put out a graphic biography of Steve Jobs with a special focus on his relationship to Buddhism—and its impact on Apple products. According

In typical cringe-inducing fashion, the New York Times's Style section profiles online magazine The New Inquiry and its raft of twenty-something editors. With its “breathless descriptions,” “frequent descriptions of clothes,” and “required mention of Ivy League degrees,” Gawker describes the article as “an excellent reminder to never talk to a Style section reporter.”

In the past four years, the New York Public Library’s workforce has been slashed by 27 percent, and its acquisitions budget for books, CDs and DVDs has seen a 26 percent reduction. Still, the NYPL is planning a massive renovation

The victory party for St. Marks Bookshop’s rent reduction is tonight from 5:30 to 7:30. It’s also the store’s thirty-fourth birthday party, so don't forget to get the staff something nice.

Egypt's longest-running literary magazine, Adab wa Naqd (Literature and Criticism), may close after twenty-seven years due to financial troubles.

Daniel Radcliffe, better known as Harry Potter, may replace Jesse Eisenberg as a young Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings, a forthcoming film about “poetry, gay stalkers and murder in 1940s New York.”

At The Los Angeles Review of Books, Glen David Gold considers the transactional nature of literary friendships: "It’s hard to explain to writing students that there are pods of very friendly, arguably moral authors who treat each other as if the

Frank Miller, the author of numerous Marvel comic books and the director of “Sin City,” recently called participants in the OWS movement “a pack of louts” and “pond scum.” Some were outraged, but Rick Moody says it’s no surprise—Miller’s outburst is part of a long history of cinematic propaganda.

Eighteen dioceses of the Catholic Church are putting German publishing giant Weltbild up for sale after the revelation that it was selling "soft porn."

Edan Lepucki gives eight compelling reasons for why she doesn’t want to self-publish.

The New York Times has announced its 11th Arts & Leisure

With the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible and the international success of Steig Larsson, the Guardian declares 2011 the “year of the translator,” and postulates that we’re closer than ever before to embarking upon a universal language.

Katie Roiphe looks for examples of "how to live"—Sarah Bakewell style—from the syllabi of David Foster Wallace.

According to Amazon, Kindle sales have quadrupled this year over last... but since the company won’t release any numbers, there’s no way of knowing how many were sold.

In other publications: Cartoonist Daniel Clowes makes (or more precisely,

Tonight Dissent and the Jacobin are hosting a panel on the future of Occupy Wall Street:

"On the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, the 99 percent poured into the streets for a massive day of protest against glaring inequalities of wealth and political power. Following nationally coordinated police raids on protest camps, occupiers face new choices about the direction of OWS. What next? On Monday, November 28, we will discuss how social movements with diverse tactics, needs, and goals grow and gain power in the face of repression.

The conversation will feature Frances Fox Piven, an

Ewan McGregor will play the middle son in HBO’s forthcoming adaptation of Johnathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections.

In what Moby Lives reads as an “apparent slap at Amazon,” Penguin has annoucned that it will no longer release its new titles through OverDrive, “the major distributor of ebooks to most libraries... including the Kindle Lending Library.”

The Paris Review now sells onesies (as in, literary baby apparel).

The two-days-before-Thanksgiving hashtag of the moment is #literaryturducken, which mashes up “not one, not two, but three classic works into one, in the spirit of the

The UC Davis English Department has backed a statement calling for the chancellor’s resignation after last week’s pepper spraying and for "a policy that will end the practice of forcibly removing non-violent student, faculty, staff, and community protesters by police on the UC Davis campus."

A new issue of the Paris Review is out, featuring interviews with Jeff Eugenides and Alan Hollinghurst, and fiction by Clarence Lispector, Roberto Bolaño, and Adam Wilson, among other goodies.

Despite the presence of Bookforum’s corporate headquarters, New York doesn’t even break the top ten in National

Europeans are slow to jump on the e-reader bandwagon.

Norway’s crime writers consider how their attitudes towards crime fiction have changed in the wake of the Oslo massacre.

What would you read in an Occupy Wall Street reading group? We’re taking suggestions on our twitter feed with the hash-tag, #owsbookclub.

Tonight at the New York Public Library, Joan Didion talks to author Sloane Crosley about Didion’s latest memoir, Blue Nights.

Designer Julian Montague’s book cover a day website should be your new go-to procrastination page.

A website called Fiction Circus is leaning on YouTube