Zadie Smith

For 15 years, Dave Eggers' McSweeney's publishing enterprise has helped readers discover all things cool and quirky. On Wednesday, the Harry Ransom Center, the humanities library at the University of Texas, announced that it has acquired the archive of McSweeney's publishing company, which includes McSweeney's books, DVD journal Wholphin, the Believer, the food magazine Lucky Peach and the center's flagship literary journal first published in 1998, Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern.

Two big announcements this afternoon:

In the U.K., Granta has just announced its prestigious, once-a-decade Best of Young British Novelists list. 

And stateside, The Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which went unawarded last year to much hand-wringing in the publishing industry, will be awarded this year.

One of the stranger recent cultural shifts is that teenage fiction has become a branch of oncology. Cancer is rampant. You're barely a chapter in before a tumour erupts or a lymphatic system turns nasty. Young heroes and heroines are terminal from page one, or a friend is, or a parent. The shadow of premature death has fallen upon the genre: one half-expects Waterstones to be staffed by Macmillan nurses.

It is axiomatic (though wrong) that teenagers will read only books that reflect teenage experience.

The list reads like a Whos Who at an exclusive book party: Junot Diaz, Ian McEwan, , Zadie Smith and Tom Wolfe. All are superstar authors who are releasing hugely anticipated books this fall, colliding in one of the most crowded literary traffic jams in...

You can get some free writing advice from the great David Foster Wallace while working on your computer.

Every Mac computer contains a copy of the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, a powerful tool for writers that features extra “word notes” from Wallace and a number of other authors, including Rae Armantrout, Joshua Ferris, Francine Prose, Zadie Smith and Simon Winchester.

Do you judge a book by its cover? Designers Jon Gray and Jamie Keenan shared their theories on attracting readers – from cute cats to alluring perfume – at the Edinburgh book festival.

1. Face theory: Research suggests that human beings spend 48.6% of their lives decoding facial communication, so a big draw for a potential book buyer will be the familiarity of a face. The cover of Nick Hornby's Otherwise Pandemonium, for example, uses a cassette tape to create the image of a face.