Stephanie Madoff-Mack is writing a memoir of her experiences with the family of Bernard L. Madoff (she was married to Mark Madoff, who committed suicide after his father's Ponzi scheme came to light). The book will be published by Blue Rider Press in December.

Why did QVC home-shopping channel mogul John Malone offer to buy Barnes and Noble for one billion dollars in cash? It’s an offer that the Wall Street Journal calls “Insane.”

Dale Peck explains why authors and readers need to fight the publishing industry as we know it. “It’s time writers thought of themselves as an army rather than a

Tonight, a motley assortment of DC rockers and authors will descend upon WORD bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn; Sara Marcus, Michael Kimball, Nathan Larson, and Zach Barocas will tell stories of the nation’s capital.

Adam Rapoport, Hugo Lindgren, Josh Tyrangiel: “Ladies and dudes, meet the Dude-itors.” These editors are “guys who preach a certain carefree editorial attitude.” Laid back as they profess to be, you should think twice before ordering a sparkling wine in their presence.

Jess Row has written a take-no-prisoners essay titled “The Novel Is Not Dead,” in which he rails against the “the aristocracy of critics, editors, publishers, and tastemakers” and calls Benjamin Kunkel “dogmatically bigoted.” Those are “fighting words,” says Kunkel in the Comments section.

New York Times, the TV show.

“Publishing

Philip Roth has won the 2011 Man Booker International Prize. One of the prize's judges, Carmen Callil, was so underwhelmed by Roth’s work that she quit the judges' panel after the award was announced, saying that the novelist “goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe."

Newt Gingrich has become a prolific book critic, penning more than one-hundred-and-fifty reviews in the past decade or so, but you won’t find them in the mainstream papers: He has opted to post his opinions at Amazon.com. At Slate, Dave Weigel attempts to divine Gingrich’s politics from these Amazon reviews. As Weigel writes, the 2012 presidential candidate’s taste for thriller fiction and pop-science is more revealing than the unsurprising party-line political books he likes: “It might not make sense when you hear Gingrich warning of the danger of electro-magnetic pulse attacks or making

Five years since James Frey made a disastrous appearance on Oprah, a contrite Frey reappeared on the show yesterday afternoon and said what he hoped Oprah wanted to hear: “Whatever happened on that show and with A Million Little Pieces happened because of me. Because I made bad choices,” Frey said, before comparing himself to Celine, Henry Miller, and Jack Kerouac; all authors who are as notable for their “bad choices” as they are for their books. Today, Frey will be back for part two of the interview.

In the longstanding battle between Time and Newsweek, Time is still on top.

Last week,

The Paris Review’s web editor Thessaly La Force is leaving the magazine for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Starting in July, The New Yorker’s Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn will become a senior editor of the Paris Review and their blog, the Daily.

A visit to Google’s campus in Silicon Valley has become a necessary stop on authors’ book tours. Since 2005, the Googleplex has hosted more than one-thousand author talks, including readings by Tina Fey, Christopher Hitchens, and novelist Junot Diaz. Recently, technology writers James Gleick (The Information) and Evgeny Morozov (The Net Delusion) made appearances, the latter author making an unpopular argument about “the dark side of Internet freedom,” while sitting in the heart of the techno-utopians’ home field. We hope that Siva Vaidhyanathan will be invited to the Plex and initiate a lively

Who are the real book critics, the paid professionals or the dedicated Amazon amatures? Historian Morris Dickstein, author Cynthia Ozick, novelist Hervé Le Tellier, and Danish novelist Carsten Jensen discuss, with Dickstein opining that “Raw opinion, no matter how deeply felt, is no substitute for argument and evidence. The democratization of reviewing is synonymous with the decay of reviewing.”

Susie Bright reveals the “terrible secret” of women’s memoirs.

Tomorrow night at KGB bar, Sam Lipsyte will read with Michael Kimball, who is known for his ability to write a person’s entire biography

At NYRB, Tim Parks has written an insightful and entertaining blog post about why Swiss author Peter Stamm is interesting to people outside his native country, and why Jonathan Franzen is not. “For the American reader there is the pleasure of recognizing the interiors Franzen so meticulously describes. Not so for the Italian, or German, or Frenchman, who simply struggles through lists of alien bric-a-brac.”

Conde Nast and Hearst have both made deals with Apple to sell magazine subscriptions in the iTunes store. But “why isn’t Time Inc. on board yet?”

Sorry for participating in "human database"

Critic Caleb Crain has written a fascinating blog post about a photo that captures President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other White House officials as they receive an “update on the mission against Osama bin Laden.” Crain argues, however, that it is possible, even likely, that they are in fact watching bin Laden’s death. The post enlarges four faces from the photo and analyzes them in minute detail: Robert Gates’s “mask of confidence,” Obama’s “grim mouth” and “hungry eyes,” Clinton’s “pure horror,” and Joe Biden thinking: "What's happening is reasonable."

This fall, powerHouse will publish

President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama have organized a poetry night at the White House, scheduled to take place on Wednesday, May 11. Readers and performers include Elizabeth Alexander, who read at Obama’s inauguration; former U.S. poet laureates Billy Collins and Rita Dove; musicians Common, Aimee Mann, and Jill Scott; and conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith, whose 2007 book Traffic transcribes twenty-four hours of traffic reports from New York AM radio station 1010 WINS. The participants will also offer a workshop for students.

The Baffler is back. Thomas Frank, who co-founded the