“Are You Absolutely, Positively, and Wholeheartedly Ready to Publish Your Novel?” You can find out here.

On April 30, the PEN World Voices Festival is hosting a panel discussion called "A New World of Yesterday: Stefan Zweig’s Utopian Nostalgia." It will feature Zweig enthusiasts Klemens Renoldner, the director of the Stefan Zweig Centre at the University of Salzburg, and George Prochnik, who has written about Freud's trip to America and the importance of silence (he is now writing a book about Zweig).  Here's the kicker: the panel will also feature Michael Hofmann, whose resume includes

Motoko Rich is leaving her post as the New York Times's publishing-beat reporter. In May, she will begin writing for the Business Day section.

A university exhibit and new book highlight David Foster Wallace's life and work, and Scott McLemee visits the relics: "A writer who kills himself runs the risk—and he must have known this—of having his life and work turned into one long suicide note."

Scholar Tariq Ramadan returns to the U.S. for the first time since he was barred from the country by the Bush Administration in 2004. He chats with author Ian Buruma, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, and war reporter George Packer tonight at Cooper Union's "Secularism, Islam, and Democracy: Muslims in Europe and the West." 

Performing songs like

Starting today, the New Republic is walling off its print content, creating the "TNR Society," a place where connoisseurs can imbibe the magazine's "premium content," and enjoy "other new perks, like insider newsletters, articles, and invitations to high-profile events." As for the clubby vibe, TNR has never prided itself on being overly friendly; as editor Leon Wieseltier said after James Wood left for the New Yorker, "David [Remnick] believes that civility is a primary intellectual virtue. I believe it’s a secondary intellectual virtue, or no intellectual virtue at all.”

Tonight at New York City's Highline Ballroom, novelists Sam Lipsyte and Colson Whitehead will be joined by porn star Lorelei Lee to read their work.

Say it ain't so, Tommaso! The New Yorker's Judith Thurman has uncovered more fraud by Italian journalist Tommaso Debenedetti, who fabricated interviews with Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, E. L. Doctorow, and a growing list of top flight authors. Debenedetti isn't yet admitting any wrongdoing, saying he’s “shocked and saddened” that his subjects deny their Obama-bashing chats.

Jack Estes, who runs Pleasure Boat press, proclaims that publishing is alive and well. Just don't expect to sell more than four hundred copies, or make a profit: "If you are writing to be published, if that's your goal,

Publishers Weekly has been purchased by PWxyz, a company run by George Slowik, who was the magazine's publisher in the eighties and early nineties.

HarperStudio, the HarperCollins imprint with an innovative plan for paying writers  (by withholding their advances), is calling it quits.

Noah Baumbach—who directed the bookish family bummer film The Squid and the Whale and, more recently, Greenberg—will adapt Claire Mesud's novel The Emperor's Children for the screen (via the Millions).

Norris Church Mailer was Norman Mailer's sixth wife. But she was also his last. (Lucky for her, she wasn't the second, Adele Morales, whom Mailer stabbed.)

Carla Blumenkranz has irrevocably shattered our illusion that book publishing is a humane, just, and kind industry. Blumenkranz offers a cutting portrait of publishing-house grunt work: "She showed me how to read manuscripts she didn't want from agents—by shuffling the pages until they looked like they'd been read," Blumenkranz writes of one editor, who also taught her "how to respond to unsolicited work—'Sorry to say that Trouble in Venice just didn't speak to me the way I'd hoped it would.'"

The Daily Beast inaugurates its "Writers to Watch" series, with the first installment's author

Celebrate National Poetry Month by dialing up Ubuweb's digitized version of Giorno Poetry Systems Dial-A-Poem Poets. It is well worth the dime.

You might think that higher e-book prices would benefit writers, but if you do the math, you find that publishers collect the extra dough.

Does a writer's life get any better than a cushy Cullman Center fellowship? An ornate office at the 42nd Street library, a $60,000 stipend, access to the library's vast research collection (presumably unhampered by the NYPL's Kafkaesque bureaucracy), and the right to call yourself a Scholar (with a capital "S").

Jennifer Gilmore is reading at Greenlight Books this evening at 7:30. It is the place to be tonight. No foolin'.

Our picks for great April and May reads, from Pub Dates, including new books from Robert Walser, Greil Marcus, and Graham Robb.