Booktrack, a New York-based startup, is adding soundtracks to e-books. Among the books it will score with music are The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jane Eyre, Romeo and Juliet, and The Three Musketeers.

Simon & Schuster has signed a book deal with John Locke, the only self-published author ever to sell a million Kindle e-books. Locke is the author of the Donovan thriller series, and has published a self-help book of sorts: How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months!

The “essential consideration” of Allan Hollinghurst’s writing is Englishness, Nakul Krishna writes in The Caravan, but can

What the president’s reading: While on vacation with his family in Martha’s Vineyard, Obama was spotted carrying Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Emma Donoghue’s Room, and The Bayou Trilogy, by Winter’s Bone author Daniel Woodrell.

Citing Chad Harbach’s $650,000 advance, New York magazine trumpets the return of big first book deals.

Dan Rather’s memoir, Summing Up, will be out next spring.

Vanessa Redgrave is going to narrate the audiobook for Joan Didion’s forthcoming memoir, Blue Nights.

"'Wittol'—a man who tolerates his wife's infidelity;" "'cyclogiro,' a type of aircraft propelled by

Book sales are falling, but comics (especially high-end collections) are doing better than ever.

Michigan-based indie publisher Dzanc Books has created a new prize for mid-career writers. The winner (to be announced after the February 1 deadline) gets a $1,000 advance and publication with Dzanc in 2013.

James Patterson is the world’s highest-paid writer, but Stephenie Meyer and Stephen King aren’t doing too badly, according to a new Forbes list.

Slavoj Zizek considers the meaning of the London riots: “The fact that the rioters have no programme . . . tells us a great deal about our

Another alt weekly announces its demise: the New York Press goes under.

Incoming freshmen at Duke and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, are spending their summer reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals; first-years at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., are learning about Mexico’s Tarahumara distance runners via Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run; and come September, new Cornell students will discuss Homer & Langley, E. L. Doctorow’s novel about “two infamous packrats who were found dead in their Harlem brownstone in 1947 surrounded by more than 100 tons of

Philip Glass has signed a deal with Norton to publish his memoirs.

A Mississippi court has thrown out a lawsuit by Ablene Cooper, a former maid who claimed she was the basis for Kathryn Stockett’s book The Help.

Prompted by chatter about Camus’ mysterious, purportedly KGB-ordained death, the New Yorker’s Richard Brody revisits the history of car crashes in French cinema.

But who will play Mapplethorpe? Playwright and screenwriter John Logan is adapting Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids into a movie.

Amazon has signed self-help author Timothy Ferriss—author of The 4-Hour Body and The 4-Hour

Bookforum excerpts The Junket, Mike Albo's excellent Kindle Single about the travails of being a freelancer in New York: "If you haven’t been to Manhattan in the last ten years, you should know that it no longer trades in durable, fungible goods except for artisanal cheese and celebrity cupcakes. These days, the city is a marketplace of intangible ideas and the internet efforts that promulgate them. Now people make millions by crowd-sourcing, aggregating and hedging funds."

N+1 editor Chad Harbach’s novel The Art of Fielding is weeks away from hitting shelves, but it’s already been optioned

A Facebook group titled “I Hate Reading” has 442,551 (and counting) more supporters than it should. Abe Books responds with a “We Hate the I Hate Reading Page” video.

As if writers didn’t have enough to stress about, a new Amazon feature called Author Central lets authors check their print sales figures by city and region.

Tom Perrotta’s forthcoming novel about being left behind after the Rapture has already been optioned for an HBO series. The Leftovers will come out with St. Martin’s Press at the end of the month.

“I met you in a Chinese restaurant in Juniper Park. You ordered General

David Orr, who spends most of his journalism dough writing about poetry, has weighed in on the rise of fantasy novels, and on why George R. R. Martin dominates the New York Times bestseller list.

Did you know you can share books on Google+? You can. The Los Angeles Times’ Jacket Copy blog explains.

April Bernard joins a slowly growing group of authors—which includes Laura Miller and Brock Clarke—who have meditated on the phenomenon of the writer's houses as tourist destination. Bernard hates it, or at least the idea “that art can be understood by examining the chewed pencils of the writer.

British looters are leaving bookstores untouched: "Books are losing out to high-end jeans and Apple-made gadgets," The Economist reports.

New York's Steven Kasher gallery celebrates the aesthetic of punk with Rude and Reckless—an exhibit dedicated to "punk and post-punk graphics." Book cover designer Chip Kidd writes, "the historic influences are abundant and cleverly re-invented: Russian Constructivism for Kraftwerk's The Man Machine; Chinese propaganda for The Clash's Sandinista, and "the decadence of the Weimar Republic for Lou Reed's Rock 'n Roll Animal," among others.

A new lawsuit

Are they ‘protestors,’ ‘looters,’ or ‘rioters?’ The Guardian parses the vocabulary of the UK riots.

Philip Levine is the right poet for our troubled times, Dwight Garner opines: “the work of Philip Levine, America’s new and 18th poet laureate, is welcome because it radiates a heat of a sort not often felt in today’s poetry, that transmitted by grease, soil, factory light, cheap and honest food, sweat, low pay, cigarettes and second shifts. It is a plainspoken poetry ready-made, it seems, for a time of S&P downgrades, a double-dip recession and debts left unpaid.”

The Washington Post will “

Philip Levine is our new Poet Laureate.

A former employee of the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, has confessed to embezzling over $1 million from the author’s estate. While many authors’ homes are under financial duress, the LA Times notes, most “are not systematically plundered."

Big British book chains are closing stores early as riots spread across London.

You’ll never get a table at Dorsia, but the Harvard Club, Indochine, and the Four Seasons still take reservations: A New York City movie scout rounds up the real-life locations featured in American Pyscho.

Boosted

Baltimore’s Edgar Allen Poe house has lost public funding and may soon have to close; that is, unless a series of Poe-inspired movies (John Cusack in ‘The Raven,’ anyone?) can help revive the late author’s legacy.

Today in conspiracy theories: Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera claims that the car crash that killed Albert Camus might have been orchestrated by the KGB in order to stop the Algerian intellectual from finishing a book critical of the Soviet Union.

Is it sexist or just offensive? Michele Bachmann says she still hasn’t seen Newsweek’s controversial new cover, which features an