If you only read one 9/11 piece this weekend (not as if there’s a paucity to choose from) our vote is for David Rieff’s Harper’s cover story on the limits of remembrance.

Linguist Ben Zimmer parses the vocabulary of 9/11; Ponyter considers how Americans' news consumption has changed since the attacks.

Keith Richards’s memoir, Life, is going to be made into a movie. But who will play Keith?

An exceptional number of off-beat, off-Broadway plays have taken their inspiration from literature, as the New Yorker notes: from “Sleep No More,” a loose adaptation of Macbeth; to Elevator Repair Service’s

Since 1977, New Yorkers have relied on indie stalwart St. Mark’s Bookshop for their zine, small press and hard-to-find theory needs; as well as for the store’s excellently curated (if somewhat cramped) reading series. But the Lower East Side institution, like many brick-and-mortar bookstores, is in dire financial straits: with book sales down, owners Bob Contant and Terry McCoy are facing the threat of closure unless they can talk Cooper Union into lowering St. Mark’s rent.

Last June, the Villager reported that over the past year, St. Mark’s has laid off almost all of its part-time workers

Michigan-based sci-fi publisher Subterranean Press is incurring Shakespearean wrath—or at least, the wrath of angry Shakespeareans—after re-releasing Orson Scott Card’s interpretation of Hamlet featuring the aging king as a child molester.

Michael Stern Hart, the founder the e-book (they were invented in 1971!), died at the age of 64 at his home in Urbana, Illinois.

They look like pianos, sewing machines, and medieval torture devices: Slate rounds up a slideshow of vintage typewriters.

He probably won’t be helping San Franciscans decide where to eat, but Yelp reviewer Cormac M. will at least

After a 24-year-old hacker was indicted for leaking over 5 million JSTOR documents online, JSTOR has partially lifted its paywall and made all of its 500,000 out-of-copyright journal articles free worldwide.

Capital New York rounds up the books that hip New Yorkers will be ostentatiously reading on the subway this fall. Read about a number of them—including Jeff Eugenides' The Marriage Plot, Joan Didion's Blue Nights, and Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding—in our fall issue.

Amazon is reportedly testing a new, tablet-friendly website design, spurring rumors that the online retail giant is

Odds are on Julian Barnes to win the Man Booker Prize this year for his novel, The Sense of an Ending. But we’re betting on dark horse candidate Patrick DeWitt; though he’s facing steep 8-to-1 odds, we thought his neo-Western The Sisters Brothers was dark, hilarious, and oddly heartfelt.

Note to novelists: Don’t pitch your book this week.

Former Slate media critic Jack Shafer has found a new home at Reuters, where he’ll join Felix Salmon in the Opinion section. Salmon, meanwhile, just launched Counterparties, a curated news site that lets readers consume Salmon’s news diet by culling the best

In February, Melville House will reissue Renata Adler's long-out-of-print Speedboat and Pitch Dark, reminding us that Adler, now best known for trashing her New Yorker colleague Pauline Kael, was also a formidable novelist and stylist. Reviewing Speedboat, John Leonard wrote: "Nobody in this country writes better prose than Renata Adler's."

n+1 editor Chad Harbach’s anticipated debut novel, The Art of Fielding has received rave reviews from Judith Shulevitz at Slate and Michiko Kakutani at The New York Times.

The Guardian has published a short work of fiction by Geoff Dyer, in which the author

Citing concerns over “office space,” the Washington Post has announced plans to close nine of their eleven regional bureaus sparing only the Virginia and Annapolis newsrooms.

At the Nieman Journalism Lab, Maria Bustillos and David Roth debate whether David Foster Wallace “prefigured the voice of blogs,” shaping how people write online.

Russia’s richest man and former Yukos oil CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky has begun writing prison dispatches: “Khodorkovsky begins his column with the grisly tale of Kolya, who disembowelled himself and threw his intestines at guards for being set up for a crime he

Too soon? Qaddafi has been out of power for less than two weeks, but Salon has already asked eight writers to fictionalize his fall.

A new study finds that positive words outrank negative ones in the English language.

“The New Yorker, What a Load of Balderdash!” say Scientologists who are handing out anti-New Yorker pamphlets outside of the magazine’s headquarters. The protesters are pointing interested parties to a long expose on the Church’s website, which claims that during the exhaustive fact-checking process of the New Yorker’s February profile of ex-Scientologist Paul Haggis, “the Church

Only five people showed up at a Naples, Florida book event for Christine O’Donnell.

France is finally getting book blurbs.

Introducing the (fake) n+1 personals: “Brooklyn wiseass, 24, delusions of grandeur and mild egomania. Eager to tell you about his novel and his perfect GRE score.”

NPR considers the art of imitating dead writers on Twitter.

The New York Times’ R&D department is at work on the next generation media reader: “a giant touchscreen that lets the whole clan read and share right from their furniture.”

Vanity Fair excerpts Chad Harbach’s debut novel, The Art of Fielding.

Last week, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed an $18 million settlement in favor of freelance writers who had had their work published online without “permission or compensation.” Andrew Albanese breaks down what this could mean for freelancers, and how the latest ruling in Tasini v. New York Times is likely to affect writers in the digital age.

How "The End of the Line for the Euro," a 12-part fictional series in Le Monde, caused financial panic in the UK.

Bibliophiles love to reflect on the effect books have on us, but Geoff Dyer would prefer to consider things the other way

After parents complained of a scene depicting a "drug-fuelled, homosexual orgy," tenth graders at Williamstown High School in New Jersey will no longer have Haruki Murakami’s classic, Norwegian Wood, on their summer reading list.

Dick Cheney’s forthcoming memoir is already making people angry.

Meanwhile, the CIA is "demanding extensive cuts" in former FBI agent Ali H. Soufan's forthcoming memoir about American intelligence and the September 11 attacks.

Geoff Dyer reads books, picks nose.

Katie Rophie talks with Nicholson Baker about House of Holes, his latest "book of raunch:" "Things are

David Rakoff, Mike Birbiglia and Rick Reilly are among the finalists for the 2011 Thurber Prize for American humor writing.

Salon wonders why Obama isn’t reading more female authors.

Greenwich Village poet Samuel Menashe died at his home in Manhattan on Monday at the age of 85. Menashe was known for his “short verse” poems, which sometimes ran only four lines long.

Curious about what Lewis Lapham’s library looks like?

Sad times at Slate: The online magazine lays off longtime media critic Jack Shafer, foreign editor June Thomas, associate editor Juliet Lapidos, and correspondent Tim Noah.