What’s it like working at Amazon.com’s Pennsylvania storage facility? "I never felt like passing out in a warehouse and I never felt treated like a piece of crap in any other warehouse but this one," said former employee Elmer Goris. "They can do that because there aren't any jobs in the area."

At the Washington Post, Ezra Klein introduces 'Wonk Reads': a weekly roundup of “the five best long-form stories related to economic and domestic policy.”

MacArthur Genius grants have been announced! Among this year’s winners: Former Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, New Yorker writer Peter Hessler, and poet

New York, London, Los Angeles, and now Toronoto: The Toronto Review of Books releases its inaugural issue. Read Bookforum's interview with founding editor Jessica Duffin.

The Phantom Tollbooth turns fifty.

The New Yorker’s Macy Halford tests Goodreads’ new recommendation algorithm by entering the books currently on her desk, including The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach, The Known World, by Edward P. Jones, Within the Context of No Context, by George W.S. Trow, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, by Michel Foucault, Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, and Alison Bechdel’s The Essential Dykes to

Landing at the same time as a White House plan to trim $3 billion from the deficit is a new exposé that purports to explain why, for the past three years, passing these kinds of policy proposals has been nearly impossible. Confidence Men, Ron Suskind’s 500-plus-page look at the infighting and palace intrigue behind the Obama White House, has quickly become what Daniel Yergin in our Fall issue calls a “Washington Read”—a book adopted by the inside-the-beltway crowd that’s generally more discussed than read. Judging by the recent explosion of media attention for Suskind, however, he seems to have

Sylvia Plath, e.e. cummings, Joseph Brodsky, and Elizabeth Bishop are four of the nine poets who will be commemorated on a new series of US postal stamps.

Christian bookstores, apparently suceptible to the same problems plaguing their secular counterparts, aren't doing so well.

Christopher Hitchens weighs in on Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s forthcoming memoir about the deaths of her husband and daughter.

Remarking on the publication of Joe McGinniss’s book on Sarah Palin, New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus argues that political nonfiction, "a form of journalism that once emphasized

New York readers! If you haven’t yet figured out a plan of attack for the Brooklyn Book Festival this weekend, don’t worry: we’re here to help. With dozens of events on the roster (not to mention parties, after-parties, and other miscellaneous Bookend events) scheduling a successful Book Festival can be a literary choose-your-own-adventure. So here are a selection of our top picks for the weekend, including a few featuring Bookforum editors Michael Miller, Chris Lehmann, and Albert Mobilio.

SUNDAY EVENTS

At 11 A.M.:

The New India. Bharati Mukherjee (Miss New India), Amitava Kumar (A Foreigner

End of the week roundup:

This week on Bookforum.com, Andrew Hulktrans reviewed influential alt-rocker Bob Mould’s memoir of "rage and melody."

Andrew Martin praised the “volatile mingling of sex, play, and violence” in Justin Torres’ debut novel, We the Animals, a surreal, episodic story of three Puerto Rican brothers growing up in upstate New York.

“Ruins have for several centuries been objects of literary and artistic veneration, reminders of real and imaginary catastrophe, images of historical hubris and souvenirs from dashed futures,” Brian Dillon writes in the introduction to his syllabus

Michel Houellebecq, French novelist, and more recently, international man of mystery, has been located after failing to show up for a book tour. Turns out, he forgot.

Barry Duncan, master palindromist.

Novelist Polly Courtney has decided that she’d rather self-publish her third novel than see it marketed as chick-lit.

Slate explains why Poets & Writers’ MFA rankings are a sham; HTML Giant explains why Slate’s article is wrong.

Next week, Crown will release muckracking author Joe McGuinness’s The Rogue, his years-in-the-making Sarah Palin book that McGuinness researched by moving in next

Readers! Join us tonight for our fall issue launch party at BookCourt in Brooklyn, featuring Bookforum friends Justin Taylor, Laura Kipnis, and Joshua Cohen. Festivities kick off with short readings around 7, and of course, free wine and beer will be flowing.

More details available here.

After failing to show up for scheduled appearances in the Netherlands and Belguim, Michel Houellebecq's publishers say that the French writer has gone missing.

Two authors were told that their post-apocalpytic young adult novel would not be published unless they agreed to "straighten" out a gay character.

Tao Lin cleans up his Facebook friend list: “i'm deleting some friends so i can add some friends that i want to add, in case you wonder why i have deleted you (just going to go through my wall and delete people who've openly shit-talked me on my wall first).”

Will Shortz explains how to

Rapper Nas has signed a deal with HarperCollins to write a memoir, tentatively titled It Ain’t Hard to Tell. The book will be co-authored with journalist and TV host Touré, and is slated to come out next year. Meanwhile, Sean (Diddy) Combs is preparing to release his own book, Culo by Mazzucco, a 248-page “photographic coffee-table collection of women’s backsides.”

Triple Canopy debuts its fourteenth issue (and first literary one!), titled Counterfactuals.

A very cheesy trailer for Haruki Murakmi’s novel 1Q84.

Roald Dahl’s family is trying to raise over $790,000 to relocate the late author’s

Anthony Bourdain, the author of Kitchen Confidential and Medium Raw, has made a deal with Dan Halpern, the publisher of HarperCollins imprint Ecco Press, to start an eponymous line of books. The tough-talking chef and adventurous diner will acquire three to five books a year—and not just about food. “We look forward to publishing an unusual mix of new authors, existing works, neglected or under-appreciated masterworks, and translations of people from elsewhere who we think are just too damned brilliant not to be available in English,” says Bourdain. “We're presently looking at an initial list

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