Blogging can be dangerous, at least according to Burmese authorities, who have imprisoned Nay Phone Latt for his posts; poets are still suspect, too—Saw Wei, who was locked up in Burma for writing a poem, has finally been released after more than two years in prison for "inducing crime against public tranquility" with his verse, which had “General Than Shwe is crazy with power” encoded within the poem.

I got a scheme—for a magazine! The beginnings of what Philip Roth dubbed "an imaginative assault upon the American experience" are detailed in an excerpt from a new history of Commentary, showing

As BEA wrapped up last week, Carolyn Kellogg observed that at an Expo aglow with iPads, it was "telling that the hot trend for fall books is dystopian fiction." Why is the dystopian novel experiencing a renaissance in Western literature after its absence for the past few decades? In an essay in Bookforum's summer issue, Keith Gessen tracks dystopia from Orwell and Huxley to Tumblr and Facebook (including a saga that peaked on the web platform Plurk), writing that the Internet has "brought into being one of the fears common to most dystopian novels and developed with some detail in 1984: that

The march of Penguin: the publisher has finally reached an agreement with Amazon to get their books on the Kindle. 

As BEA ended yesterday, the Expo's director announced that it will go back to a three-day format next year. That's good news for international attendees, who find that two days just isn't enough time, and good news for those fed up with the crammed main aisles, though there was one place to get away from the jostling crowds—the eerily quiet Digital Book Zone. At New York magazine's Vulture blog, Boris Kachka detected a "dystopian mood of the attendees and the panels," but the

Despite spotty Wi-Fi, anxiety about publishing's future, and the appearance of an aged Rick Springfield, BEA was bustling on Wednesday. In the cavernous Javits center, galleys were distributed, deals were struck, catalogs thumbed through, and business cards swapped, with Wiley providing cups of free beer to help grease the wheels. The New York Times noticed a "certain frenzied feel," about the conference, while GalleyCat made the rounds at the day's book parties, affirming Harold Underdown's much repeated tweet: "After two hours of pushing through the crowds at #bea10, I have reached a simple

"Some of us have wondered whether university presses were going to survive in the digital age," writes Stan Katz in The Chronicle of Higher Education, "but most universities have not abandoned their presses." Southern Methodist University Press suspended its operations, but others, such as Princeton University Press, are thriving. Inside Higher Ed's Scott McLemee reports that while many university presses are at this year's BookExpo, others are "rethinking how they approach the publishing industry's biggest shindig," noting that The University of California Press, Temple University Press, MIT

Exit Index: Total number of editors jettisoned 

from Harper's in 2010: no less than 5. The magazine has announced the departure of two more top-of-the-masthead staff.

GalleyCat prowled the halls of the Javits Center on Tuesday, wrapping up the day's BookExpo events, while its companion blog eBookNewser detailed the conference's digital news. The Constant Conversation sent this downbeat dispatch to booksellers: "we’re not asking you to save us; we’re asking you to save yourselves," while Publisher's Weekly reported from BEA's DIY conference. At the LA Times Jacket Copy, Carolyn Kellogg summed

BEA can blur past faster than a Kindle page-turn, leaving the bookish with the uneasy feeling that they've missed something, but now they can map the three day publishing maelstrom in advance with My BEA Show Planner.

"We" would like to "inform" you that scare quotes are "frightening," just "say" what you "mean." Greil Marcus, who recently co-edited the exhaustive A New Literary History of America, found scare quotes—"a narrative disease"—scattered throughout the more than two-hundred essays in the collection, and sees them as "a matter of a writer protecting himself or herself." When Marcus

Bookforum's new summer issue maps utopia, and though the word means "no place" in Greek, that absurdity hasn't inhibited a great many dreamers and schemers: History is littered with attempts to realize some portion of heaven on earth, and literature is rife with depictions of worlds gone right and worlds gone very wrong. 

When he died in 1979, J. G. Farrell was hailed as his generation's greatest historical novelist. Thirty years later, the view still holds, at least among the judges of the "lost" Booker award, who granted the prize to Troubles, his wicked 1970 satire of Anglo-Irish relations

The new City Lights catalog cover seems to be saying "Smash your Kindle," according to eBookNewser, but in a long letter in response, publisher Elaine Katzenberger says they've got it all wrong.

Rock, paper, Twitter: Christopher R. Weingarten plans to be the Last Rock Critic Standing, but it sure isn't easy. Weingarten tweeted more than one thousand reviews last year, wrote for the Village Voice and rollingstone.com, produced a book, and often contributes to online music message boards, though he thinks the Internet is diluting serious music and criticism: "We all wanted to democratize art.

In 2006, Peter Beinart proclaimed that liberals were the only ones who could "Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again," putting a lefty gloss on the neocons' war plans, but oddly he didn't mention Israel's role in America’s “War on Terror.” Now, in an essay in the New York Review of Books, Beinart writes that "morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral," thanks to its uncritical support for Netenyahu's hard-right coalition government in Israel, against the express wish of most American Jews—especially younger ones—to re-engage the Palestinian peace process.  

Writing from

The book world is buzzing over next week's new Stieg Larsson novel, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. Knopf has unveiled a flashy book trailer, dubbing Larrson's heroine Lisbeth Salander "a one woman vengeance machine." At Salon, Laura Miller writes that Larsson's prose is "as flat and featureless as the Scandinavian landscape," but that the underlying drama, between the flawed order of institutions and a Lisbeth-like anarchy, is "a contest that still captivates us because we all feel those warring impulses within ourselves." At Time, Lev Grossman details the battle over Larsson's legacy

In search of "literary pyrotechnics with a heart," Bloomsbury USA, known for its non-fiction, is expanding its fiction list, including a new novel by Matthew Sharpe, author of 2008's Jamestown.

As the labyrinthine BEA conference comes to New York next week, the array of events, tables, and booths at the Javits center (as well as the off-site parties) will be a little easier to navigate with the BEA To Go mobile app, which, contra Apple, will work on any web browser. Aside from schedules and maps, the app will have news, twitter feeds, and audio and video, among other handy features.

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