The New Yorker

On Nov. 18, 1941, a struggling Manhattan author wrote to a young woman in Toronto to tell her to look for a new piece of his in a coming issue of The New Yorker. This short story, he said, about “a prep school kid on his Christmas vacation,” had inspired his editor to ask for an entire series on the character, but the author himself was having misgivings. “I’ll try a couple more, anyway,” he wrote, “and if I begin to miss my mark I’ll quit.”

He ended the letter by asking for her reaction to “the first Holden story,”

Prize-winning investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein will speak to true crime fans and conspiracy enthusiasts around the globe through a series of interactive online video chats discussing some of history's most intriguing unsolved crimes, which are the topic of his recent book, The Annals of Unsolved Crime.

The series will comprise an initial six online chats on Tuesdays at 5pm EDT and will be powered by Shindig.com, an interactive platform for large scale video chat events, allowing attendees to enjoy a live talk by a notable personality, share the stage to ask them questions face-to-face or to privately video chat with other participants in the event. "Shindig provides an extraordinary interactive means of directly answering questions provoked by the cases in my book," Epstein said. The discussions will be free, but are limited to the first 800 RSVPs who sign up at: www.mhpbooks.com/unsolvedcrime

The How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia author adopted Murakami's philosophy of prioritizing physical fitness in order to maximize creativity—and reaped the benefits.

Here's how to get a writer's body in seven days. Spend hours hunched over a keyboard in low light, exercising nothing but your eyelids and your finger muscles. Subsist on coffee, cigarettes, and the occasional croissant. Drink no water; whiskey's better. Look up at your heroes on the wall: sickly, malnourished, funny-looking people who died of lupus and liver failure on the hot trail of the truth.

One evening this past January, we co-hosted a party at Michael’s New York celebrating the winners of the Saturday Evening Post’s Great American Fiction Contest (congratulations again, Lucy Bledsoe!). During the event, Steven Slon, Editorial Director of the Post, leaned over to me, pointed toward the tables in the front of the restaurant, and said, “Do you know who’s out there?” Turns out, we were there at the same time as the Adam’s Round Table, a group of illustrious mystery writers who meet monthly at various New York restaurants. (Some of you may have read Jeffrey Toobin’s recent story about this in The New Yorker.) Later, as I was leaving our party, I found myself walking directly past this celebrated group.

 The Internet may be disrupting much of the book industry, but for short-story writers it has been a good thing.

Story collections, an often underappreciated literary cousin of novels, are experiencing a resurgence, driven by a proliferation of digital options that offer not only new creative opportunities but exposure and revenue as well.

Already, 2013 has yielded an unusually rich crop of short-story collections, including George Saunders’s “Tenth of December,” which arrived in January with a media splash normally reserved for Hollywood movies and moved quickly onto the best-seller lists.

The writer Lawrence Wright doesn’t seem at all the sort of person you’d find in public wearing a black cowboy shirt emblazoned with big white buffalos. He’s shy, soft-spoken, a little professorial. But as if he didn’t have enough to do, besides working on three plays simultaneously and getting ready to publish a new book in two weeks, Mr. Wright has been taking piano lessons with Floyd Domino, the two-time Grammy winner, and on a recent Saturday, in his buffalo shirt…

Books — staid and intellectual cultural artifacts that they so often are — were not all just staid or intellectual this year. Not nearly. There were, in fact, scandals, at least a few of them surrounding books and their authors and publishers, and there were times in which discussions of books and the business grew dramatic and tension-filled. Near-scandals! Other times, these conversations were simply very, very interesting, full of twists and turns, much like a good book.

The recently announced merger of Penguin and Random House, which is owned by Bertelsmann in Germany, sent shock waves throughout Western publishing circles. This new leviathan will publish a quarter of all books appearing in English, with annual sales of close to $4 billion, yet it is being treated by The New York Times and other media as a routine and perhaps even beneficial development.

And so, this was it, the publishing event of the century: J K Rowling and the Publisher's Hype. The story had everything. The one million pre-orders. The profile in The New Yorker. The adulation! The vilification! You'd never guess that all Rowling did was write a book.

Reviews of The Casual Vacancy were strictly embargoed until its publication on Thursday, and, in the absence of a book, much of the criticism focused on Rowling's politics, her refusal to give interviews, her giving too many interviews, and the embargo itself.

Will it break a record? Probably. But is it good? That’s the big question of the day, as “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling’s first adult novel, “The Casual Vacancy,” hit shelves this morning. It was protected by a number of security procedures, including a stringent non-disclosure agreement, so only a few reviews leaked out before the 1 a.m. EST embargo time.