Last night, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz hosted a "mingle" at Brooklyn Borough Hall in honor of the upcoming Brooklyn Book Festival, which will take place on September 18. Participants will include Kurt Andersen, Brooke Gladstone, John Hodgman, Phillip Lopate, Sigrid Nunez, Christian Parenti, Adrian Tomine, Touré, Dorothy Allison, Russell Banks,Nuruddin Farah, Jonathan Safran Foer, Diana Gabaldon, Amitav Ghosh, Jessica Hagedorn, Pete Hamill, A.M. Homes, Nicole Krauss, Jhumpa Lahiri, Terry McMillan, Larry McMurtry, Walter Mosley, Joyce Carol Oates, Téa Obreht, Karen Russell, John

Hey kids, it’s Bloomsday. You can celebrate with other people in New York. Or you can celebrate in the privacy of your own home...oh yes yes yes.

At Salon, Andrew O’Hehir reviews Andrew Rossi’s new documentary film, Page One: Inside the New York Times. The film follows the New York Times’ tribulations against the changing world of media and O’Hehir concludes: “Rossi's film makes a compelling case on behalf of the traditional values of journalism.” Page One opens tomorrow in New York City.

At the Paris Review Daily, How to Win author and Harper’s contributing editor Clancy Martin details how

The summer issue of the Paris Review is out today; now available in a digital edition. Highlights include an amazing portfolio of video art curated by Marilyn Minter, new fiction by Jonathan Lethem, part two of Roberto Bolano’s The Third Reich, and interviews with William Gibson and Samuel R. Delany. Also: Beach towels!

The blog Harriet details a new exhibition at the Tate Britain museum dedicated to the short-lived early twentieth-century art and poetry movement called Vorticism, which included Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound. The museum writes, “The Vorticists forged a distinctive style combining machine-age forms and energetic imagery, embracing modernity and blasting away the staid legacy of the Edwardian past.”

Tonight, New York’s Cake Shop will host the last Mixer reading of the season, featuring Nick Flynn, Katie Peterson, Jibade Khalil Huffman, Sandra Lim, and Mal Blum.

There’s a free audio book download

At MobyLives, Nathan Ihara reviews some recent books that ponder boredom as a gateway to enlightenment (or a road to ruin). He discuses The Pale King, of course, as well as the novel The Canal by Lee Rourke, and a recent article by Joseph Epstein in Commentary magazine that covers the new non-fiction titles Boredom: A Lively History by Peter Toohey, and A Philosophy of Boredom by Lars Svendsen. Ihara quotes Foster Wallace’s notably downbeat commencement address from Kenyon college in 2005, and Epstein praises Joseph Brodsky’s similar 1989 Dartmouth speech, in which “Brodsky told the 1,100

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, the genial author famous for his exploits as a daring British soldier in World War II (he once kidnapped a German general) and for his wanderlust (he walked for a year across Europe in the mid-1930s), died on Friday at the age of ninety-six. Fermor’s reputation as one of the greatest travel writers in English is based on the first two books of an unfinished trilogy detailing his perambulations across the tumultuous pre-war European landscape while a teenager, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, written from memory forty years later. Recently, the NYRB

Saturday at Dia:Chelsea, Triple Canopy and Printed Matter join forces to celebrate the publication of Gwen Allen's new book, Artists' Magazines, with a panel featuring artist Paul Chan, The Serving Library co-founder Angie Keefer, artist Matt Keegan, Specific Object founder David Platzker; moderated by Triple Canopy’s Colby Chamberlain.

The New York Review of Books has announced a conference to celebrate the life and work of historian Tony Judt, which is scheduled to take place June 23-25 in Paris.

“I hammer it out sentence by sentence and it takes a long time. That's what the work is, right? To make the reader think it is not hard to do.” The Guardian profiles Janet Malcolm.

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop—the MFA program that has launched thousands of careers—turns seventy-five.

Google has a new feature that makes it easier to track down some authors’ online work [via the Book Bench].

Bomb has published part 2 of its spectacular

Polemical journalist Matt Taibbi responds to Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “elaborate defense” of Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman Sachs’s chief executive.

The em dashes blog lists a handful of People Magazine's highbrow literary moments, which included profiles of Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, and Christopher Isherwood.

According to an article at the Business Insider, it is time for those who scoffed at the New York Times’s online-subscription plan to “eat crow.”

At Salon, Tracy Clark-Flory writes about Erica Jong’s anthology Sugar in My Bowl, in which women authors such as Ariel Levy, Meghan

The Observer’s redesign of its print edition and website debuts today. Editor-in-chief Elizabeth Spiers told Yahoo News: “The new design does little to distinguish between long form features that appear in the paper and long-form web exclusives, which we'll be doing far more of. . . . [But] the biggest change will be an emphasis on breaking news and smaller scoops throughout the day.”

Open Letter Books is launching a new e-book series.

James Franco should savor this moment: His appearance in the book trailer for the novel Super Sad True Love Story won out over Jay-Z’s chat about his book

Jeffrey Eugenides talks about “Asleep in the Lord,” a story from his forthcoming, highly anticipated novel The Marriage Plot, which he says is “the most autobiographical thing I’ve ever written.”

HarperCollins’s imprint Ecco has bought the rights to Philipp Meyer’s new novel, The Son, a multi-generational epic set in Texas, after a “heated auction.” Meyer, recently named one of the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40, published his previous book, American Rust (2009), with Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House.

You’ve read the tweets, you’ve seen the book trailer, now it's time to kick back with

The legendary literary journal Open City recently released their last issue, but thankfully have an anthology forthcoming—a volume of more than eight-hundred pages of works by essential writers like Sam Lipsyte, Ed Park, Mary Gaitskill, Rivka Galchen, and many more. Meanwhile, No Near Exit, another must-read anthology selected from a decade of Post Road magazine, in which writers pick their favorite pieces, is also in the works—the two books provide essential summer reading, and will surely lead to finding new favorite authors to keep you busy all year long.

Groucho Marx in a letter to the