The early work of web stars such as Ana Marie Cox and Josh Marshall, novelist Sam Lipsyte, music critic Alex Ross, and Bookforum co-editor Chris Lehmann, as well as many others, has been put online at the Feed Magazine archives, an online webzine launched fifteen years ago by Steven Johnson and Stefanie Syman that ran through 2001.

The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" writers to watch list has been one of the biggest stories of the summer so far, but half the fun of the list is arguing about it. The latest counter-list comes from Dzanc books, who have polled "nearly 100 independent publishers,

On Tuesday, Susan Orlean posted a piece on her New Yorker blog about the publishing world, in which she identified everyone involved by letter instead of name (e.g. Editor A, Publisher W). The Observer thinks it has solved the puzzle, but is there a letter—or a number—missing?

The Authors Guild versus Google case continues to drag on, more than five years since it began, and four months since a final settlement was supposed to be reached. With so much time on their hands, the litigants may find diversion—if not solace—in reading Bleak House, available for free—and in full—on Google Books.

Follow the adventures of Reagan Arthur, Book Editor, on the Paris Review blog's Culture Diary. In the first installment of the ongoing journal, Arthur travels to Toronto, meets George Pelecanos, and then at 4:30, after reading some manuscripts, takes a well-deserved nap.

In Paris, the Shakespeare and Company festival drew about six-thousand people to a tent near Notre Dame last weekend to talk about "Storytelling and Politics," but all anyone really wanted to talk about was soccer, Lauren Elkin reports. Still, there was some literary chat—Martin Amis calling himself a “millenarian feminist”

Tom Bissell's new book Extra Lives is a treatise on the cultural significance of video games; though Bissell likens gaming to drug addiction, his cocaine turns out to be reviewer Dwight Garner's Ambien.

The blogging platform WordPress is "the 21st-century equivalent of Gutenberg’s printing press," making media stars out of writers like Justin Halpern, who tweeted and blogged his way to the top of the bestseller list from his parent's home, the latest in a string of blog-to-book deals. 

It isn't "the internet that threatens little magazines and journals . . . it's the waning of communities of

An American gripe: We've asked Henry Roth biographer Steven Kellman to comment on the recent articles in Slate and Harper's that object to the posthumous edits exacted by Willing Davidson on Roth's trove of archived manuscript pages (known as “Batch II”). In an email interview, Kellman, who reviewed An American Type for Bookforum, writes: 

“At Slate, Judith Shulevitz complains that An American Type reads too much like a New Yorker writer . . . The truth is that Roth was a New Yorker writer, not simply because two sections from Batch II appeared in the magazine in 2006 or because Willing

The New York Times has been granted access to John Updike's archives. Among its many revelations is a letter that the nineteen-year-old Updike wrote to his parents: “We do not need men like Proust and Joyce; men like this are a luxury, an added fillip that an abundant culture can produce only after the more basic literary need has been filled. . . . We need great artists who are willing to accept restrictions, and who love their environments with such vitality that they can produce an epic out of the Protestant ethic.” The Times fawningly characterizes it as “a prescient formulation of what he

Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker has won the 2010 IMPAC prize for his debut novel, The Twin, published in the US by Brooklyn's Archipelago Books. Now that this season's awarding of literary laurels has concluded, catch up on all the winners at The Millions, who have updated their list of prizewinners.

Atlas Shrugged is coming soon to a theater near you, as it has finally begun shooting, but the question remains: Will it Be Worse Than the Book? 

In "An Author's Redemption from Ignorance," professor and author Barbara J. King sets out to explain what writers don't understand about publishing.

Hearing the news of José Saramago's passing today at the age of 87, we couldn't help but think of the author's playful parrying with death and immortality in his recent novel, Death With Interruptions, in which the reaper takes a vacation and causes people to live too long. As Jason Weiss wrote in his 2009 review for Bookforum, "the implications of life everlasting become evident, and the blessing begins to resemble a curse . . . [Saramago] refreshes the old trope of immortality by treating it as fertile ground for playing out his incisive variations, exploring not only our fear of death but

Implementing an RSS reader can be an aggressive step towards organizing the glut of online information, but as the unread count grows, so does the anxiety—and culling feeds can be just as painful as discarding a book.

David L. Ulin, the LA Times book editor for the last five years, is moving from editor to critic.

Slow readers of the world unite! As we spend much of our time skimming websites, text messages, and emails, an English professor at the University of New Hampshire is making the case for slowing down to get more meaning and pleasure out of the written word. 

In the New Statesman,

When Henry Roth died in 1995, he left thousands of manuscript pages behind. The New Yorker published two pieces drawn from the trove, “God the Novelist,” and “Freight,” and a young fiction editor at the magazine, Willing Davidson, shaped the pages into the novel An American Type. At Slate, Judith Shulevitz questions the posthumous edits, writing "the saddest ending of all would be if Roth's amorphous, neurotic . . . 'sense of life' was precisely what got polished out of his work." Meanwhile, at The National, Sam Munson calls Davidson's sculpting of the novel "heroic," while in Harper's (

As if the Paris Review's defeat at the hands of n+1 in softball this week wasn't bad enough, the Review blog's recap of the game is being called for a balk, as the Awl takes issue with their blog's "transgression of English."

A. M. Homes chats with the death-defying feminist artist Elizabeth Streb (including a video of Streb behind the scenes), whose "extreme action events" keep audiences wondering when they should duck; author Danielle Dutton reads from her forthcoming novel S P R A W L, and much more from the summer issue of BOMB. 

Tonight, blogger Maud Newton interviews novelist Sarah

To celebrate Bloomsday, Paris-based blogger Lauren Elkin chats with Keri Walsh, editor of the Letters of Sylvia Beach, and Sylvia Beach Whitman, heir to both Beach's name and (now in a new location on the Left Bank) her bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, which first published Joyce's magnum opus in 1922.