Readers! Our Dec/Jan issue is now online. Check out the table of contents, then rush out and buy an issue!

Jenny Diski does not care about crime writer Lindsay Ashford's claim that Jane Austen may have died of arsenic poisoning.

Jesmyn Ward, Stephen Greenblatt, and Nikky Finney won National Book awards for fiction, non-fiction and poetry, respectively. Samples of their books are available here.

What can you learn about a small, turn-of-the-century town from library ledgers? At Slate, John Plotz writes about a surprisingly comprehensive database that tracks the borrowing records of the Muncie

The National Book Awards took place last night at Cipriani Wall Street, just a few blocks from one of today's protests.

Despite inaccuracies with names, places, and events (not to mention one big conflict of interest) Bill O’Reilly’s book Killing Lincoln is for sale in the Ford’s Theater Society gift shop.

Spotted in the Twitterverse: “So it turns out that Shakespeare’s stage direction 'Exit, pursued by a bear' was written for a real polar bear.”

Over at the Believer, Claire Hamilton and Jon Cotner, co-author of Ten Walks/Two Talks, have assembled a slide show that documents their eight-mile

Did New York City police destroy some of the People’s Library when they raided Zuccotti Park early Tuesday morning? Protesters think so; but the city insists that the 5,554 books (at least some of them) are safely being stored at the 57th Street Sanitation Garage. Meanwhile, writers are planning to convene in the park at 6 p.m. tonight to rebuild the library.

Novelist Ben Ehrenreich compiles a Spotify playlist of the songs he listened to while writing his novel Ether.

Salman Rushdie gripes on Twitter about Facebook deactivating his account for using the name on his passport: Ahmed Rushdie.

Editor and critic Parul Seghal has left Publishers Weekly to become an associate editor for NPR.

"If you’re going to hit somebody, hit a professor”—poet Geoffery G. O'Brien defends Occupy Cal during a confrontation between police and UC Berkeley students. As O'Brien reports: "The cop said, ‘you want some?’ It was a rhetorical question, and I was hit viciously in the ribs and went to the ground.”

Tonight at The Tank in Manhattan, author Jeff Sharlet will be joined by performance artist Reverend Billy (Bill Talen) to discuss Occupy Wall Street, Talen’s new book The Reverend Billy Project, and

Congratulations to our friends at New Herring Press, who celebrated their launch on Sunday in Brooklyn with readings by Parul Sehgal, Lynne Tillman, Nitsuh Abebe, Amanda Davidson, and Francis Richard. And with a piano bar.

Random House in Canada is testing out a new, ticketed model of book tours that includes the cost of a book in the price.

New York Times critic Janet Maslin excoriates Haruki Murakami’s opus 1Q84, and the Onion’s AV club gives the book a "D" rating.

Morris Philipson, the former University of Chicago Press director responsible for first publishing translations of Claude

The Second Pass founder John Williams has been hired to oversee online books coverage at the New York Times.

The Los Angeles Times goes behind the scenes at a company dedicated to filming book trailers.

Why would spy novelist Q. R. Markham plagiarize dozens of passages in his new book? The Book Bench’s Macy Halford investigates the discovery that led Little, Brown to recall the novel, and pushed Assassin of Secrets’ Amazon sales ranking up from 62,924 to 174 in a single day.

“My father and I grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town and he was gay and I was gay and he killed himself and

Christopher Hitchens is dominating a Publisher’s Weekly readers poll for favorite book of the year. His essay collection Arguably has garnered 91.55 percent of the votes. Aside from the “other” category (2.63%), the closest contender is Tina Fey’s Bossypants (1.83%). Meanwhile, The Marriage Plot hasn’t even broken the 1 percent barrier.

Novelists Jonathan Lethem and Jennifer Egan and playwright Lynn Nottage held forth at Occupy Wall Street this week, with Lethem telling the crowd: “Even those who sneer or berate . . . they’re one of you—one of us—just not willing—not yet—to see it.” Today,

The Dec/Jan issue of Bookforum won't be in stores (or mailboxes) until the end of the month, but, early issues are being handed out at the People's Library at Zuccotti Park this afternoon. Head down to grab a free copy!

David Lodge’s A Man of Parts, Rosa Luxembourg, and T.S. Eliot’s letters round out the Atlantic’s list of the best books of 2011. Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, Karl Marlantes’s What It Is Like to Go to War and Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography make Amazon’s list of the top books of 2011. Speaking of Chad Harbach, here’s a video of him on Emily

Jonathan Lethem pens a takedown in the Los Angeles Review of Books of a tough but positive review New Yorker critic James Wood wrote of Lethem's novel The Fortress of Solitude, while at The Millions, Alan Hollinghurst slams Wood’s review of his latest book as “so pathetic that I stopped taking it seriously.”

Slate’s staff selects its “new classics”: books, movies, songs, and even typefaces that staffers think will stand the test of time. Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Volume 1, and Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man get nods in the books department.

How publishers handled illustrating “The Joy of Sex”

Readers! The Dec/Jan issue of Bookforum hits stands this week, featuring Jeff Sharlet on Occupy Wall Street, Natasha Vargas-Cooper on Norman Mailer and Marilyn Monroe, Dennis Lim on Haruki Murakami, and lots, lots, more.

Also, it’s Occupy Wall Street week on Bookforum.com—throughout the week, we’ll be running essays by Will Bunch, Sarah Leonard, and Aaron Lake Smith.

Jonathan Lethem will be at the Occupy Wall Street Library today at 3:30 for a teach-in. Lethem recently contributed the story "Tickling the Corpse" to the Occupy Writers blog.

Steve Buscemi is directing an adaptation of William

The Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary prize, has gone to a high school biology teacher from Lyon, Alexis Jenni, for his six-hundred page debut novel, The French Art of War. He might not be quitting his day job soon, though: The Goncourt only comes with a ten euro honorarium.

Self-publishing websites are huge in China, attracting more than forty percent of all Chinese internet users every month.

The New York Times profiles the Wilde Boys Salon, a “roving salon for self-described queer poets at which attendees lounge fetchingly and flirtation comes in the guise of academic one-upmanship,”

After weeks of negotiation, Cooper Union has agreed to give East Village bookstore St. Mark's Bookshop a break on its rent, reducing their monthly payments from $20,000 to $17,500 for a year, and forgiving $7,000 in debt. This is half of the $5,000 monthly reduction St. Mark's owners say they need to stay in business, and there are no plans yet to rehire laid-off staff.

New Yorkers: If you’re free this this evening, you should head to the 92nd Street Y to hear Nuruddin Farrah and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’—two of the most accomplished African novelists working today—sit down for a chat. The talk will