CHRIS LEHMANN CHATS ABOUT 'RICH PEOPLE THINGS'

Chris Lehmann is a conspicuously over-employed editor and cultural critic. He’s a co-editor of Bookforum, a deputy editor for the Yahoo news blog The Upshot, a columnist for the Awl, a contributing editor for The Baffler, and a guitarist and singer for the band The Charm Offensive. He’s also just penned a book, Rich People Things, which will be published this fall by OR books. We recently caught up with Mr. Lehmann via email to discuss the how his blog column became a book, why he considers himself an economic populist, and what we talk about when

Tonight, the Rumpus ushers in autumn with a "Summer Shakedown" event. There's a stellar lineup of authors including Nick Flynn (The Ticking is the Bomb), Sara Marcus (Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution), and Hilton Als (Justin Bond/Jackie Curtis), as well as comedians Michael Showalter and Jessi Klein, performers Elissa Bassist and Corrina Bain, and music by Frankie Rose and the Outs.

The new Paris Review is out, and we haven't been so excited about a literary magazine in ages. It's the first issue edited by Lorin Stein, and if it’s any indication, he's taking the

The true identity of the famed Twitter satirist Emperor Franzen and Evil Wylie has been revealed!

If you're in New York this weekend, you really must go to the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday. There are too many events to list, but here are just a few highlights: Joshua Cohen and Matthew Sharpe will talk about Kafka; poet John Ashbery will discuss his work with Paul Auster; and Bookforum  co-editor Albert Mobilio will talk about international noir with Mexican author Paco Ignacio Taibo II, French author Caryl Férey, and New York's Pete Hamill. Other participating authors include Mary Gaitskill, Colson Whitehead, Russell Banks, and Stephen Elliott. There are also a number of related events

Novelist Lionel Shriver details her experience of how "publishers are complicit in ghettoising not only women writers but women readers into [an] implicitly lesser cultural tier." Using her own novels as examples, such as the disturbing health care tale, So Much for That, Shriver writes that publishers’ insistence on "trussing up my novels as sweet, girly and soft is like stuffing a rottweiler in a dress." 

Former Poet Laureate Billy Collins was recently quoted in the Wall Street Journal saying, "lyrics just don't hold up without the music . . . I assure [my students] that Jim Morrison is not

The shortlist for the 2010 Man Booker Prize has been announced.

Sure, we may have entered the age of wireless devices and ADD, but as The Millions points out, big, sprawling novels with lots of characters aren't dead yet. In fact, "the current profusion of long novels would seem to complicate the picture of the Incredible Shrinking Attention Span."

OR Books, the new independent publisher who does not work with Amazon, has announced that it will publish Douglas Rushkoff's Program or Be Programmed, in which the novelist and countercultural essayist will attempt to help you swim, not sink, in

French novelist Michel Houellebecq's controversial work has been called racist and sexist (and sometimes brilliant). Now critics are crying "plagiarism," as the author apparently pasted portions of Wikipedia into his new novel, The Map and the Territory. Houellebecq has responded to the charge with his usual sangfroid: "When you use a big word like 'plagiarism,' even if the accusation is ridiculous, something (of the accusation) will always remain. . . . And if people really think that, then they haven't the first notion of what literature is." 

At the New Republic G. W. Bowersock remembers 

Henry James, Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, J. K. Rowling, Franz Kafka: As a new anthology shows, no writer is too sacred for parody. Eric Ormsby considers highlights in the history of literary ridicule.

If you're looking for an exra-bleak holiday-weekend book, try Simenon's spiky psychological thriller Red Lights (1955), which opens on the Friday evening before Labor Day, as New Yorker Steve Hogan leaves his Madison Avenue office to meet his wife. They are about to drive to Maine, but first, Steve needs a drink. Once they're on the road, he pulls over at a bar, where he loses his wife

In a letter to shareholders filed with the S.E.C., Barnes and Noble's board of directors write that they believe Los Angeles-based investor Ronald Burkle has "a self-serving agenda to seize control of Barnes and Noble," and outline actions that the shareholders can take to thwart the coup. They write: "Burkle has provided no strategic vision and offered no plan for the Company’s future. Instead, he continues to take conflicting positions, hoping shareholders will be taken in. We think only one conclusion is clear—you cannot believe what Burkle says, and you certainly do not want him in

The Guardian's Books blog has begun its "Not the Booker Prize" competition, where you can nominate a book to win England's second most coveted literary award. Read the wonderfully wry terms and conditions (all twelve of them) before you vote, but think twice before nominating yourself: 2009's winner, Rana Dasgupta, found his triumph to be "very depressing."

Random House reports that it saw a boost in profits in the first half of 2010. Thanks, Stieg Larsson!

As students make their way back to college, powerHouse Books is publishing a reprint of the 1965 cult classic Take Ivy, a collection of

On July 30, Kevin Morrissey, the managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, took his own life. Following that, questions were raised about how the award-winning literary magazine, which is  affiliated with the University of Virginia, has been run under editor Ted Genoways. Most have questioned how the magazine spent its money, and some have debated whether Genoways was a "bully" in the workplace. But no one predicted that the small-print-run journal would cancel its winter issue and close its offices—or that it would become national news. That this is happening a month after Morrissey's

In the past couple of weeks big-name agents like Andrew Wylie and authors like Seth Godin have used e-books to challenge traditional publishing, making us protectively clutch our paperbacks. At Digital Book World, Emily Williams examines the crucial questions of copyright and contracts in the emerging battle to control the e-book future, while at The Atlantic, Tim Carmody looks back at "10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books." The latest craze of the heady e-book era, the Kindle 3, is out now and earning rave reviews; John Naughton explains why this version of Amazon's e-reader will thrive: "