Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, is stepping down to be replaced by Washington bureau chief Jill Abramson, the first woman editor of the paper in its history.

Tonight at the poweHouse arena in Brooklyn, the winners of the 2011 Moby Awards will be announced.

The Awl has a very entertaining history of “dirty talk” (e.g., vagina, blowjob) at the traditionally squeamish New Yorker. But take note: Contrary to the Awl’s account, the word asshole appeared in that magazine’s pages well before 1994. In an article about Artforum that appeared in the New Yorker’s October 20, 1986 issue, Janet Malcolm quotes art critic Rosalind Krauss, who describes two curators as "sounding like complete assholes.” [Update: The New Yorker has issued a handful of corrections to the Awl's history: Asshole, it turns out, appeared in 1975; blowjob in 1995.)

VIDA has released

Books or booze? A peek at digital marketing manager Ryan Chapman’s hilarious iPhone auto-correct.

Yesterday, the Fales Library at NYU made the Sylvère Lotringer Papers and Semiotext(e) Archive available to researchers. Lotringer is an author, publisher, and social critic widely credited with bringing French theorists such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Baudrillard to English-language readers. As Fales’s Senior Archivist Lisa Darms says, “Sylvère's collection could have gone to any number of big league institutions, but by choosing Fales and positioning his archive in the context of

Remembering Gil Scott-Heron [via Harriet].

In a weekend op-ed adapted from Jonathan Franzen's recent commencement speech at Kenyon college, the novelist and bird-watching enthusiast Franzen suggests that we should put down our BlackBerries and pick up some binoculars.

A good woman is hard to find, at least if you’re one of the Esquire staff putting together the “75 books every man should read: An unranked, incomplete, utterly biased list of the greatest works of literature ever published.” The 2008 list (re-posted for the holiday weekend) includes only one book by a woman novelist, Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find. In

Last week when Hugo Lindgren posted Kurt Andersen’s shortlist of annoying “words we don’t say” from his late-90s New York Magazine days (ie “celeb,” eatery,” “hubby”) readers responded with dozens of words and phrases they find irritating.

Publishers Weekly picks the big books from BEA, and makes this year’s Expo sound almost retro: “Hardcover fiction is back.”

Quirk Books has unleashed sea monsters into Sense and Sensibility and zombies into Pride and Prejudice, but now they’re infesting a book with the most terrifying beast of all. Bedbugs is a novel featuring the nettlesome insects as they

BEA Diary, Part 2. Highlights: Flavor Flav arrives at the Javits Center, wearing a crown. Lisa Pearson, the mastermind behind Siglio Press, gives Bookforum editors two of her Georges Perec-inspired paper airplanes, and reading the detailed Publishers Weekly coverage of the Expo, which seems to be produced instantly and almost makes being at the conference seem unnecessary. Lowlight: Making eye contact with a Scientologist dressed in pirate’s garb.

So much time, energy, and money is spent traveling to and attending conferences like BEA, and yet the experience often leaves participants feeling

After taking on the neurotic comedy of Jonathan Ames, HBO is moving on to the harder stuff: The network is planning to air a show written by Sam Lipsyte, author of acerbic, stylish, and deeply felt novels such as The Ask. The “offbeat comedy,” titled People City, will portray the misadventures of a 25-year-old man who is hired by a New York couple to care for their child.

In Elle, novelist Kate Christensen explains what it’s like to write from a man’s point of view.

BookExpo America Diary, Part One: It’s smaller (duh) and Apple wasn’t around. There are fewer clowns, Borat impersonators, and

An article in Prospect argues that more bad reviews would result in better books.

The good news: the New Yorker is putting out a special issue this week, featuring a decade’s worth of highlights from its “Talk of the Town” column. The bad news: Subscribers won’t receive this issue in the mail. Also: Every single ad in the issue is for shows broadcast on the USA network.

The Rumpus online book club recently invited author Deborah Baker to discuss her new book, The Convert, a biography of Maryam Jameelah. Jameelah left America in the late 60s and moved to Pakistan, where she wrote bold books

Gary Shteyngart has released the sequel to the popular trailer for his novel Super Sad True Love Story, which has just been published in paperback. In the new video short, Shteyngart and Paul Giamatti “act out their own buddy comedy.”

BookExpo America will turn Manhattan into a publishing mecca this week. While the majority of the conferences will be held on Tuesday through Thursday at the Javits Center, there are a slew of events elsewhere in the metropolis all week long. Today, New York Book Week begins with events at Barnes and Noble, the Symphony Space, the New York Public Library, and

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