South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, a “Tea Party politician on the rise,” has signed a book deal with Sentinel, which will publish her memoir Can’t Is Not an Option: My Story in January 2012.

The Guardian details the disastrous results of the recently announced Booker Prize, which columnist (and Wodehouse biographer) Robert McCrum calls a “car crash.” Meanwhile, another one of Britain’s literary awards, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, has been suspended.

The Rest Is Noise author Alex Ross has been documenting his visit to Italy, including his trip to Venice’s San Michel cemetery, where he

Was Shakespeare a stoner?

Oxford ditches the comma, deeply annoying the spirit of David Foster Wallace. “[Wallace] is the only writer ever to convince (or even try to convince) the famously stubborn Times copy desk that we should temporarily ignore the paper’s famous serial-comma rule—the paper doesn’t use them; this really drove David nuts.”

Chris Suellentrop quits NYT Magazine to join Yahoo News.

On July 2, the Publication Studio is throwing a “collaborative event” at the Brooklyn Grange Farm, “a zero chemical input commercial urban farm located on a New York City rooftop.”

Penguin goes

Members of the Village Voice’s union shop are prepared to strike if a new contract with company management is not agreed upon by midnight on Thursday. We doubt it will come to that (Voice contract negotiations have historically involved threats of a strike), but if it does, the union says that it will launch an alternative website.

In Chicago, retired engineer Malcolm O'Hagan is planning the American Writers Museum. The city has a long literary history, with authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, and Raymond Chandler calling the windy city home, as well as hosting contemporary authors

Philip Roth says he no longer reads any fiction at all. Why? “I wised up,” he reports.

Thomas Beller—the author, Open City editor, and mastermind behind the website of urban writing Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood—has written an entertaining article about following a Google Street View car in New Orleans.

The Paris Review website has a post about Tom Bean and Luke Poling’s feature documentary, Plimpton!, which details the rich life of editor, writer, fireworks enthusiast, bon vivant, and sometime baseball player George Plimpton (he also sparred with boxing legends Archie Moore and Sugar Ray Robinson,

The New York Review of Books has published a new story by master short fiction writer Deborah Eisenberg. In the story, a young boy named Adam looks through his family’s photo album and finds an exciting revelation.

This weekend’s New York Times Magazine story by Jose Vargas, in which he confesses to falsifying documents to illegally work as a US journalist for years, has been met with sharply conflicting reactions in the media world.

Elizabeth Bishop refused to be a token woman in all-male poetry anthologies, and didn’t want to be in all-female collections, either, writing: “Undoubtedly gender

Last month, the New York Times gave Jon-Jon Goulian the triple-crown treatment, devoting three articles to the literary-party mainstay whose memoir, The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt, was set to make him one of “the season's publishing darlings.” But according to the Awl and the New York Post’s Page Six, Goulian’s book, for which Random House paid a reported $700,000 advance, has sold only 957 copies in the first month.

NPR's Fresh Air remembers historian Tony Judt.

Christopher Frizzelle, editor of the alt-weekly The Seattle Stranger, claims that novelist Tao Lin and his publisher, Melville

A hoax website claims that Slavov Zizek and Lady Gaga are close friends, and the New York Post falls for it.

In February, Caravan Magazine published an excerpt from Siddhartha Deb’s forthcoming book about contemporary India, The Beautiful and the Damned, published by Penguin in India. The excerpt, “Sweet Smell of Success: How Arindam Chaudhuri Made a Fortune Off the Aspirations—and Insecurities—of India’s Middle Classes,” is a critical take on Arindam Chaudhuri and the business approach of Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM). Now, the IIPM is suing Caravan, its proprietor the

Ai Weiwei—the artist, blogger, and activist who was arrested in Beijing on April 3—has been released on bail.

In an article about what the editors and staff of n+1 are reading this summer (Houellebecq, Echols, Maupin, Woolf, and more), the journal’s co-founder Marco Roth writes of experiencing a Proustian epiphany in France: Perhaps it was a sign that he would be awarded the 2011 Roger Shattuck Prize (along with Lila Azam Zanganeh) from The Center for Fiction, an honor named after one of Proust’s most astute critics. They’ll be celebrating the prize tonight at The Center, but we assure you that critic Dale Peck won’t be there.

The New York Times remembers A. Whitney Ellsworth, the first publisher of

Soho Press has announced that it will publish Paula Bomer’s debut novel, Nine Months, in 2012. We’re still reeling from Bomer’s brilliant and savage story collection, Baby, which Minna Proctor described in this winter’s Bookforum as “punk rock for the roundly domesticated.”

The British Library and Google are digitizing more than 250,000 books, spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

Coffee House Press’s founder and publisher, Allan Kornblum, is retiring from the imprint he founded in 1973, with Associate publisher Chris Fischbach taking over the top position [via Publishers Lunch].

What kind of book makes for good e-reading? Two of the most popular iPad book apps offer examples of what the fledgling art of the e-book could become. TS Eliot’s The Wasteland has a wealth of features annotating the poem, offering curious readers (or puzzled students) new insights into the allusive text. The digital version of Jack Keroauc’s On the Road is jazzed-up with audio recordings, notes detailing his route, biographies of the real people his characters were based on, and a collection of documents from the Viking archive. The Road iPad app isn’t for those Kerouac fans who are, as the

“My only concern is with the future of long-form prose writing and how people want it and how we’re going to connect the reader to the book—whether they want it electronically or in print.” Ethan Nosowsky, the talented Graywolf Press editor who helped usher Geoff Dyer’s latest essay collection, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition into print, reflects on publishing's next step.

Bizarre lunch triangle: You can now bid on the opportunity to dine out with Slavoj Zizek and Julian Assange.

What’s the story behind the shocking novel Histoire d’O?

The OED gets an update: New words for June include