Getting to know your Nobel Laureate...

Late last night on the Scandinavian side of the world, the Nobel Prize Committee awarded the 2011 Prize in Literature to Tomas Tranströmer, making him the first Swede in more than thirty years to win a Nobel. Sweden's best-known poet and a psychologist specializing in juvenile offenders, Tranströmer made his debut on Sweden's literary scene when he was just 23 with with his 1954 collection "17 Poems." Over the next decade, he started to make a name for himself across the Atlantic, befriending poet Robert Bly and falling in with the "Deep Image" school of

Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, whose work explores "themes of nature, isolation and identity" has won the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Ethan Nosowsky, most recently the editor-at-large of Graywolf Press and formerly of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and the Creative Capital Foundation, is now McSweeney’s editorial director.

In honor of the fortieth anniversary of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Zach Baron heads to Sin City in search of Thompson’s ghost. “Writers only go to Las Vegas for one reason, really,” Baron writes in the first of his four-part series. “It is our World Series of Poker,

Hypertext fiction was once thought to be the next big thing, but instead it has basically vanished (when is the last time you read a hypertext novel?). Author Paul La Farge, whose new book Luminous Airplanes has an online “hyperromance” component, concludes that the promising medium was killed by bad timing and worse luck: “Born into a world that wasn’t quite ready for it, and encumbered with lousy technology and user-hostile interface design, it got a bad reputation, at least outside of specialized reading circles.”

For around fifteen Euros, public writers in France will polish your resume,

New Yorkers! If you're not busy occupying Wall Street (or if you are, and need a break) come hear Bookforum editor Chris Lehmann read from his book Rich People Things and share his thoughts on "the predator class" at McNally Jackson tonight at 7.

An Italian court has overturned a 26-year prison sentence against Amanda Knox for allegedly murdering her British roommate while on a study-abroad program in Perugia. Knox, who has spent the past four years in prison, hasn’t said what she plans to do next, but according to her family, a book deal is likely.

Many reviews have pointed out the similarities

Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is being adapted into a movie starring Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks. It’s set to be released on Christmas Day. Here’s the trailer.

In the Times Higher Education supplement, Uwe Schütte, a former student of W.G. Sebald, reflects on Sebald’s tortured relationship to academia, and his final years teaching at the University of East Anglia.

What are the odds of Haruki Murakami winning the Nobel Prize for Literature? According to UK betting organization Ladbrookes, 8:1. The winner will be announced on Thursday.

A bookstore owner has

Courtney Love is writing a memoir.

UK wagering house Ladbrookes guesstimates that Syrian poet Adonis will win this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature.

Newsweek talks with Jeffrey Eugenides about his forthcoming novel, The Marriage Plot.

The TLS gives some love to overlooked Modernist (and Bookforum favorite) Mina Loy, a writer whose oeuvre T. S. Eliot refused to discuss on the grounds that “her writing was too inconsistent to view as a whole.”

High-achieving siblings Alison and Adam Gopnik review Jeffrey Kluger’s The Sibling in this week New York Times’ Book Review. (What, Blake wasn’t

Long-lost books by VS Pritchett, Edith Sitwell, and Alec Waugh (among others) will be back in print soon thanks to Bloomsbury’s new digital publishing imprint, Bloomsbury List.

Amazon has upped the ante in the e-reader wars with the Amazon Fire, a tablet that’s positioned to compete with the iPad, but at $199, is roughly half the price.

Following Moneyball’s lucrative opening weekend, Warner Brothers has tapped Michael Lewis to adapt Liar’s Poker, his debut book about working on Wall Street in the boom-bust 1980s, into a movie. “I’m going to spend the next two months doing that,” Lewis told

James Franco, aka “America’s most famous poetry geek,” is not only teaching a poetry-heavy film class at NYU, but he’s asked his nine student to direct short films based on C.K. Williams poems.

Found in the wonderful Lingua Franca archives: Daniel Zalewski on the advent of silent reading.

Magazine publishers Hearst, Conde Nast, and Meredith have all signed on to sell digital versions of their publications (which include Esquire, The New Yorker, Vogue, and Wired) on Amazon’s new i-Pad-like e-reader. The notable absence? Time, Inc.

A former handyman who stole rare manuscripts by Winston

Arthur Conan Doyle’s first manuscript, which was lost in the mail and never published during the Sherlock Holmes author’s lifetime, will finally see the light of day. The British Library has released “The Narrative of John Smith,” “a novel from the perspective of a 50-year-old man who is confined to his room when he has an attack of gout.”

Siddhartha Deb celebrates the launch of his new book, The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of New India, at KGB Bar in Manhattan on Tuesday.

On the occasion of a new Library of America publication of Ambrose Bierce’s collected writings, The Atlantic’s

Things you may not know about Ernest Hemingway: he had a son named Bumby, he taught Ezra Pound how to box, and at the end of his life, he “had shock treatments at the Mayo Clinic and believed the FBI was following him” (which was actually true). James Salter assesses Paul Hendrickson’s new biography of Papa in the New York Review of Books.

Astronomers in Texas have figured out the exact hour that Mary Shelley decided to write Frankenstein based on her description of the moonlight on Lake Geneva in June of 1816.

Courtesy of The Atlantic, a visual history of literary references on “The Simpsons.”

End-of-week-original-content-roundup! This week at Bookforum.com:

Justin Taylor considers Jess Row’s new story collection: “The stories in Nobody Ever Gets Lost, take us from Thailand to the Punjab to New York City (and elsewhere around the Northeast), but wherever they touch down we find the same thing: psychically wounded people stunned by a world at once too vast and too small.”

Morten Høi Jensen reviews Geoff Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme, and speaks with Helen DeWitt about data and literature, and the difficulties of publishing her new book, Lightning Rods.

In our syllabi section,

Amazon Publishing has hired Believer fiction editor Ed Park (a man the Times once dubbed “the wizard of whimsy”) to acquire fiction for their new literary imprint.

From Triple Canopy’s literary issue, selections from David Wojnarowicz's archives.

Rumor alert: Facebook may introduce a “read” button (that’s past tense) in addition to “listened” and “watched” buttons.

Bill Clinton’s next book, Back to Work, will be published this November by Knopf.

Because New York (and children) don’t produce enough smells on their own, a new Kickstarter project is fundraising for a scratch n’ sniff children’s