Colson Whitehead has announced that his new book, Zone One, will be published in October. It’s a disaster novel! Whitehead tweeted yesterday that it “concerns the rehabilitation of NYC after the apocalypse,” adding later, "if the book were a mash-up, it'd be Leonard Cohen's 'The Future' + Wire's 'Reuters' + Joy Division's 'Decades'." Whitehead is the author of, among other things, a nonfiction book about the city (Colossus of New York), a satire about branding (Apex Hides the Hurt), and the most hilarious Twitter feed we know of. Is it too much to hope that this postapocalyptic novel is a

Granta magazine has announced a Kindle edition: “If you want to read the magazine on a Kindle, your copy can arrive in under a minute. An improvement in speed of 40,000 per cent. Perhaps this is the way of the future. Trees in Sweden will live a little longer.”

The turmoil at Harper’s continues. Last week, the Harper’s Union held an online fundraiser that they say raised $50,000 dollars to help keep the magazine from losing staff. (It's been reported that publisher John R. MacArthur is undecided whether to accept the money, telling Forbes "I don’t want to take money from people of modest incomes, and I certainly don’t want to accept corporate or foundation money that, too often, comes with strings attached.") Yesterday, Harper’s associate editor Theodore Ross announced on his blog, Dadwagon, that he had accepted a severance package after six years on

We’ve just heard that Sheila Heti’s second novel, How Should A Person Be?, has been sold to Henry Holt for publication in summer 2012. We’ve been praising the book since the day we scored a copy from Toronto’s House of Anansi Press this fall, and were puzzled by the seeming lack of stateside interest in publishing it. One Observer article, an excerpt in n+1, and some proclamations of Heti’s talent from literati such as n+1 editor Mark Greif and art critic Dave Hickey and—presto!—as Heti told us in an email: “There were three other houses interested, so things did turn around very quickly indeed,

Three Percent, the organization dedicated to international literature, has announced the nominees for its annual Best Translated Book Awards.

Bloomsbury USA has signed an anonymous author to write a tell-all about his illustrious career “helping students cheat.” Ed Dante, as he’s now known, has written term papers for graduate and undergraduate students for years, and will reveal his true identity when his book is published in 2012.

The union at Harper’s Magazine attempts to prevent the layoff of Ben Metcalf and others by asking for reader support.

Now that Martin Amis is moving to New York,

Mark Salter is declared to be the author of the anonymous Obama novel, O.

The New York Times is publishing its first e-book, executive editor Bill Keller’s Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy: Complete and Updated Coverage from The New York Times (an essay adapted from the book's introduction will be published in this Sunday's Times magazine and is already available online). The book will be available on January 31, at all the major e-book retailers. Keller says "The publication of Open Secrets as an e-book is the latest example of the Times exploiting the creative potential of the Web to deliver the world's best journalism in whatever format readers

Daniel Bell is dead: The man who famously declared himself “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture” has passed away at age 91. Bell was central among the New York intellectuals, and one of the era’s last surviving figures. He authored such seminal works as Marxian Socialism in the United States (1952), The End of Ideology (1960), and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1978), and with his classmate and friend Irving Kristol, Bell helped found and edit the Public Interest in 1965, eventually departing from the journal when Kristol moved to the

To-do list in New York tonight: Go to the Fales Library at NYU to see authors Eileen Myles, David Trinidad, and Brad Gooch celebrate the work of poet Tim Dlugos (1950-1990). Dlugos was the author of the amazing poem “G-9” (named after the AIDS ward at Roosevelt Hospital), and—earlier in his career—a clever and almost mournful riff on Gilligan’s Island, which is the inspiration for a new series of paintings by Philip Monaghan on display in Fales’s gallery.

Just when you thought Brooklyn couldn’t get any more literary, Martin Amis and his wife Isabel Fonseca are adding more authorial talent to

GalleyCat has created a “mixtape” sampler of links to books nominated for the NBCC awards (announced on Saturday) with free Amazon previews, while the New Yorker’s Book Bench has composed a list of links to profiles, reviews, and other pieces the magazine has run about the finalists.

Tonight at St. Mark's Bookshop, the legendary pandrogynous musician, artist, and writer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge will read from his book Thee Psychick Bible with author Lonley Christopher, whose new story collection The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse was just published by Akashic Books.

Dear Prudence: A

On Saturday night a crowd of critics and authors gathered at WNYC’s hi-tech Jerome L. Greene Performance space, where the finalists for the 2010 NBCC awards were announced. (Afterwards, the conversations we overheard were mostly jokes about the shock of the novel Freedom making the cut, and compliments on the strength of the overall list.) Critic and editor Parul Sehgal was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and Dalkey Archive Press won the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement. The rest of the winners will be announced on March 10th, following two days of

The competitors and judges of the 2011 Tournament of Books have been announced. If last year’s competition (see the post-game wrapup) is any indication, this is going to be great.

Crain’s New York and Galleycat: Bob Dylan has reportedly signed a six-book deal with Simon & Schuster. Andrew Wylie, the artist’s literary agent, was, according to one unnamed editor, seeking an eight-figure offer. Among the six books will be a followup to Dylan’s memoir Chronicles: Volume One.

At the Millions, Colin Marshall has written an informative “primer” about the novels of Jean-Philippe Toussaint. “Toussaint