Tonight, Bookforum co-editor and poet Albert Mobilio will read from his new book, Touch Wood, at the annual Poets House Showcase with Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Jena Osman, and Evie Shockley.

After writing twelve columns and chalking up a 41.6 percent correction rate, Bill Keller is giving up his much-lambasted New York Times Magazine column.

The Guardian publishes its top-twelve picks for this year’s Booker Prize.

The Atlantic has posted part of its summer fiction issue, featuring stories and essays by Ariel Dorfman, Wendell Berry, and John Barth, among others.

The Awl presents some mini-excerpts from Nicholson Baker’s soon-to-be-published sex-saturated novel, House of Holes.

Young adult novelist John Green proves that if you have enough Twitter followers, your book doesn’t

Werner Herzog was spotted at Comic-Con: “I have never seen the collective dreams all in one place,” he remarked.

Mental Floss rounds up the fifteen of the best words with no English equivalent, including ‘gumusservi’ (Turkish for moonlight shining on water), ‘kummerspeck’ (German for weight gained by emotional overeating; literally translates to ‘bacon grief’), and ‘slampadato,’ the Italian term for tanning-bed addiction.

The Guardian complains that straightforward facts are ruining history books.

Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides’s read at the Paris Review offices on Thursday with a black eye and

We're deeply excited about "Reading Life," a new weekly column in the New York Times by "world-class noticer" Geoff Dyer.

He might not be the writer we want, but is Tao Lin the writer the digital generation deserves?

The New Yorker's Book Bench flags the emergence of 'hipster lit' as a bookstore category, and wonders, rightly, where the women writers are.

Saul Bellow, Anthony Burgess, and Tobias Wolff all have first novels that are best forgotten, but among the three, Wolff has gotten closest to scrubbing his debut effort, Ugly Rumours, from publishing history, Elon Green writes at The Awl.

Britain's House of Lords launches an inquiry into how the decline of newspapers will affect investigative journalism.

Media used to be full of moguls, but no longer: The Economist opines that Rupert Murdoch is “the last member of a dying breed.”

The Hangover star Bradley Cooper gets cast as Lucifer in a new film adaptation of “Paradise Lost.”

Why was Ayn Rand such a bestseller? “Because she writes the best children’s literature in America,” former editor Patrick O’Connor told The Millions’ Gary Percesepe. “The Fountainhead is practically a rite of passage for alienated youth. She writes these epic, Wagnerian things. Where the sex takes place on the very highest plane and it speaks to the kids’ highest

At The Guardian, Jim Crace surveys the history of phone hacking in literature.

New York magazine argues that one of the main characters in Jeff Eugenides’s forthcoming novel The Marriage Plot (which we’ll all be hearing plenty about over the next several months) is modeled on David Foster Wallace.

A lesbian couple is asked to stop holding hands—at a Gertrude Stein exhibition in San Francisco.

As British Prime Minister David Cameron comes under attack for his ties to the Murdoch empire, News International stock enjoyed an upward bounce Tuesday thanks to Rupert’s testimony before Parliament.

A Pandora for books? Mashable reports on BookLamp, “A book recommendation engine built on book content and writing style instead of sales data.”

With digital technology speeding up the book publication cycle, and fewer copy editors to catch mistakes, Virginia Heffernan says we’re living in an age of typos.

Are the books authors are best known for always their best books? Definitely not, argues the The Guardian.

With budget cuts looming, the University of California Press will suspend its poetry book series, New California Poetry.

Tonight at McNally Jackson Books, novelist Dana Spiotta chats

It was bring your son to work day in the British Parliament on Tuesday as Rupert and James Murdoch testified in London about the News of the World hacking scandal. Amid rumors that Rupert might be forced to resign as CEO of News International, the eighty-year-old media mogul maintained that he knew nothing of the scope of the misconduct, and gave parliamentarians the ‘bad apple’ excuse, saying that News of the World makes up less than one percent of his 53,000-employee empire. Leaning across his son James, he told the panel, “this is the most humble day of my life." (According to the offical

Borders has announced plans to liquidate all its remaining stores after negotiations with a private-equity investor collapsed, and they failed to receive any other bids. According to the Wall Street Journal, stores will start closing as soon as Friday, and the chain will go out of business entirely by September. Nearly eleven-thousand people will lose their jobs as a result of the shutdown.

Slavoj Zizek dismisses the rumor that he and Lady Gaga are dating, which was started by a group of “anti-authoritarian communists” and picked up by some New York tabloids.

Colson Whitehead files his first

Saturday was the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Catcher in the Rye. To commemorate the event, writer and Salinger scholar Michael Moats contemplates the origins of Holden Caulfield.

The Los Angeles Review of Books runs the first segment of Mike Davis’s nine-part biography of Harrison Gray Otis, an early twentieth century newspaper mogul, a “wrathful gargoyle with a walrus moustache and Custer goatee,” and the so-called “inventor” of modern Los Angeles.

You probably won’t remember this: Psychologists at Columbia University have found that people are significantly less likely to

Happy 75th birthday, New Directions!

Thomas Pynchon’s Manhattan Beach, California duplex is on the market for a cool $1.05 million. FSG wonders if it “smells like weed and genius.”

Paris Review editor Lorin Stein sends his staff a postcard from Paris: “My hosts at Shakespeare & Co. kindly booked me a room around the corner from the famous shop. Mine is the best room the Hotel Esmeralda has to offer, and one of the highest, smelling faintly but not unpleasantly of blow-dryer and dead mouse. It is five flights up.”

From the Lapham’s Quarterly food issue: the cheese (Limburger, specifically)