How did Dan Brown, the immensely popular and successful bad writer behind such hits as The Da Vinci Code and Hey, There's a Treasure Map Under This Painting!, get to be such an immensely popular and successful bad writer? He just loves "reading," meaning "listening to stuff."
In this lively interview, Lit author Mary Karr calls James Frey a "lying sack of shit" and says "Dr. Drew should be shot."
This nice, humanizing interview with Neal Pollack also proves: Neal Pollack has lost publishers a lot of money.
On this, the final day of 2012, allow us to draw your attention to what is—if memory serves—the most obnoxious letter to the editor of the New York Times Book Review of the entire year, conveniently published in yesterday's edition.
Neil Barofsky was at the very center of the U.S. government's response to the 2008 economic collapse. He spent more than two years, until March of 2011, as Special Inspector General for the TARP program, overseeing and monitoring government bailout funds. Now, Barofsky has written a ferocious book detailing how, he…
Georgina Bloomberg (pictured, atop steed) is the 29 year-old daughter of billionaire New York mayor-for-life Mike Bloomberg. But she's not just your typical rich kid. Oh no. She's charted her own path and earned a reputation for being "free-spirited," according to Manhattan magazine. Deservedly so!
Peter Braunstein was a former writer for The Village Voice, WWD and other New York publications who became a tabloid sensation in 2005 after he went crazy, raped a woman [Correction: Braunstein was convicted of kidnapping, sexual abuse, robbery and burglary. He was never charged with rape], and went on the run. Aaron…
In Slate today, Adam Gopnik, the "Adam Gopnik's kids" correspondent for The New Yorker, explains the fine distinctions of New Yorkerania: "compare Mencken and Liebling, often mistaken as twin stylists, and you see the difference between heavy-handed Teutonic mockery and the ideal ironic, stinging, New Yorker tone."
Derrick Bell, a leading racial thinker and law school professor, has died at the age of 80. Besides being an accomplished author, founder of critical race theory, and the first tenured black law professor at Harvard, Bell was famous for quitting jobs on principle: as a young man, he quit a job at the Justice…
The world's premier gambling event, the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature, happens on Thursday. Who's gonna win? Bob Dylan? (No.) Here are your betting odds!
Gawker Book Club is back! Today, we bring you an excerpt from Sad Monsters—an illustrated book of "humorous stories about the undead ... and the unloved"—written by Colbert Report staff writer Frank Lesser, and illustrated by Willie Real.
In your hopeful Wednesday media column: someone gives Capital New York some dough, Chris Rovzar leaves New York, Elisabeth Murdoch has tons of News Corp shareholder cash, Village Voice sex lawsuit dismissed, and the world's highest paid authors.
You think the owner of that book store doesn't know what you're doing? Oh, they know exactly what you're doing. You say you "love" books? You say you enjoy perusing the soothing aisles of a book store, so lovingly curated by a book store owner who spends his or her life ensuring that the very latest and most…
Harry Hurt III (pictured, with pal) used to write a column in the New York Times business section called "Executive Pursuits," in which Harry Hurt went off and did something wacky and upscale and wrote about it. It always struck me as a wholly unnecessary exercise in self-absorption, which had nothing to do with…
Jersey Shore heffalump Snooki told the Daily News that she'd like to be called by her real name, Nicole, now that she's a published author. Here are some good reasons why that will never happen.
Last night, Bill Carter—late-night television guru and author of The War for Late Night—stopped by for a chat with Jimmy Kimmel. Immediately, Kimmel took issue with the unflattering physical description of him in Carter's book. Their exchange, inside.
Author Jonathan Franzen had what he claims was a "delightful" meeting with Barack Obama in the White House today, to talk about whatever. Hopefully Obama finished that copy of Freedom he illicitly accepted at a Martha's Vineyard bookstore beforehand.
[Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa gets out of a cab in New York today after being named the recipient of this year's Nobel Prize in literature. Image via AP]
Today we looked at the case of Mitchell Heisman, the guy who shot himself in Harvard Yard and left a 1,900-page online suicide note. One commenter sees the signs of a common problem among aspiring writers.
Former Daily Beast writer and world-class plagiarist Gerald Posner is being sued by Frank Owen, an author whose book Clubland was plagiarized by Posner. We have selections from Owen's complaint, filed in New York district court this morning, below.
