The National Book Critics Circle awards have been announced. Three of the winners were all too predictable: Hillary Mantel won in fiction for Wolf Hall, Richard Holmes scored the non-fiction prize with The Age of Wonder, and Blake Bailey took home the biography prize for Cheever: A Life. But if there are people who bet on the NBCC Awards (and we hope there are), the big winnings went to those who put their money on Eula Biss, whose hard-to-categorize Notes from No Man's Land came out of nowhere to take the prize for criticism.

Novelist Sam Lipsyte and Giancarlo Ditrapano talk vices over at

Tonight, the National Book Critics Circle awards will be announced. Catch up on all the nominees with thirty books in thirty days. 

HarperCollins has nabbed Senator Scott Brown's memoir, set for publication in early 2011.

The winners of the 2010 Best Translated Book Award were just announced. Gail Hareven’s The Confessions of Noa Weber, translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu and published by Melville House Press, captured the award for fiction (beating out Robert Walser's The Tanners [!]), while Elena Fanailova’s The Russian Version, translated from the Russian by Genya Turovskaya and

Tonight at the New School, the finalists for this year's National Book Critics Circle award, which will be announced tomorrow night, will read their work. It's the book world's answer to the Academy Awards' red-carpet ceremony. Well, kind of. Unlike the Oscars, the NBCC event is free and open to the public.

Want middlebrow? There will be an app for that.

Proving that there is nothing in the world that can't be bought and shipped to Texas, David Foster Wallace's papers have landed in Austin. The Harry Ransom Center, with its Lone Star State-sized acquisitions budget, has scored many of

Ayn Rand swooned over serial killer William Hickman, calling him "the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul." That’s funny, we thought she was talking about Alan Greenspan.

11 more of the world's Coolest Bookcases.

Karl Rove's Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight goes on sale today. Hey, boy genius, "consequences," is not a concept that you want readers to brood about. Politico offers a few choice quotes. We're trying

The Oscars were infinitely more bearable last night thanks to the peanut gallery of literary tweeters: Colson Whitehead, Edward Champion, and Julie Klausner. This from Bookforum's own Chris Lehmann: "If James Cameron ends the night drunk and sobbing, I'm happy."

Borders cuts workforce; employees call it "Black Thursday."

Barnes and Noble to offer discounted e-Books to print book buyers.

"I swear to God," David Shields tells Bookslut, "I can’t read a book unless it has miniature numbered sections. I exaggerate, but only slightly." A not-so-subtle plug for his new manifesto, Reality Hunger,

FSG's Lorin Stein has been named as The Paris Review's new editor and will start in April. This is a wise hire: Stein not only has good taste, he's knowledgeable about the book market (Roberto Bolaño had a devoted following before FSG started publishing him, but Stein made the Chilean author into the phenomenon he is today). Stein is also well-connected, having worked with authors like Denis Johnson, Sam Lipstye, and Lydia Davis. Oh, and last but not least, he's fun at parties, which means that he will keep a spark of George Plimpton's legacy alive.

David Foster Wallace's work continues to

Writer Barry Hannah has died at age 67. Though pigeonholed as a "Southern author," his work (especially Airships and Ray) has had a wide influence. His admirers included Ben Marcus, Steve Almond, Gary Lutz, and Pavement's Stephen Malkmus. One admiring student learned of Hannah's death in a tweet, and reports: "Death told via Twitter hits like a fist."

Digital books are cheaper to make than the old-fashioned kind, but publishers agree; making e-books ain't free.

Ayn Rand and Susan Sontag "were both brave, both immensely persuasive to hordes of acolytes, and both incredibly deluded."

The City

The Columbia Journalism Review's survey of magazine websites has found that online content is a mess.

FT.com reports that Eating Animals author Jonathan Safran Foer is no foodie: "I find people who devote their whole lives to taste a little strange."

After selling Library Journal and School Library Journal to Media Source, Reed Business Information has named a new publisher at Publishers Weekly.

Margaret Atwood foresees the end of the world.

Victorian publishers thought libraries would destroy the book industry. Now, publishers worry that e-book piracy will do the same.

Gawker edits Knopf editor Carole Baron, and boy does she need it.

There is much chatter about David Shields's liberal use of quotations in Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (the Times calls him a "free appropriation writer"), but his own thoughts still appear in the book. For one, he calls James Frey a "terrible writer." Here's an excerpt of Shields cross-fading quips on hip-hop; can you spot his pithy musings among those by Picasso, Godard, Goethe, Emerson, and Borges?

Despite clunky novels like Yellow Dog, his views on Islam, and recent spats in the press with former friends, Martin Amis is still

A leaked list of books that might be available on the epoch-shattering iPad, from The Unofficial Apple Weblog. What's the deal with the lack of McGraw-Hill books? More leaks, speculation, and denials; will the intrigue ever end?

The Daily Beast's list of the most popular books in 16 cities contains few surprises (Dan Brown dominates), though we were shocked to see that Going Rogue tops Seattle’s bestsellers. Has “the real America” annexed another province? (New Yorkers, don't feel too superior: Sarah Pallin's book is No. 5 in the Big Apple.)

As big publishers fret over the future of the book

Skip grad school and get all the writerly advice you need at Flavorwire, which has collected mantras for writers: Zadie Smith's grand, "Avoid cliques, gangs, groups," Jonathan Franzen's techie, "Never use the word 'then' as a ­conjunction," and Richard Ford's sage, "Don't write letters to the editor." That's good counsel from Ford, who is famous for spitting on Colson Whitehead, who panned Ford's A Multitude of Sins; why write a lowly letter when you can log a direct complaint?

The Awl's Maria Bustillos writes "Dave Eggers is the most detested man in American haute-literary circles," and

To see how publishers are advertising in the digital age, subscribe to FSG's newsletter The LipSite, which promotes Sam Lipsyte's book The Ask (pub date: 3/2) by sending readers doses of the novel's acidic wit (and author interviews) "precisely at the most depressing point of your workweek." Perhaps it is better than those trailers that publishers use to promote books, which Salon's Laura Miller calls "silly," but if you're going to do a trailer, do it like this clever one for John Wray's Lowboy.

Polish up your love stories, readers: the editors at htmlgiant are holding a writing contest, to