Gordon Lish, for those of you who do not follow literary gossip, was a famous editor in the 1970s and 1980s. Nowadays, he is primarily remembered as Raymond Carver's editor, whose short stories he shaved down to knife-edge minimalism. For no apparent reason at all, Newsweek just profiled Lish. He's a bit of a hater,…

Some people like Hillary Clinton. Other people dislike Hillary Clinton. However you feel about Hillary Clinton, it is difficult to deny that she is one of the most cold and calculating political figures in all the land.

Today The Fault in Our Stars, based on a bestselling book by John Green, will debut in theatres across America. No cultural phenomenon can go unpunished by the good folks at Slate. So we get a piece with the thesis, "Adults should feel embarrassed about reading literature written for children."

If it's summertime, and you have a net worth that is at least seven figures, that means it's time for JPMorgan's suggested summer reading list—the books that they tell their wealthy clients to pretend to read this summer. The wealthy, their bankers apparently believe, are dumb.

Fame, in the arena of book-writing, is a curious thing. Being a well-known writer of literary fiction doesn't necessarily translate into bestsellerdom. Almost never does it give you the kind of household name that even a lesser Kardashian achieves.

Amazon, the Cthulhu of retail, finds itself embroiled in a spat with a major book publisher. It's gotten nasty. And, remarkably, Amazon is losing the PR battle. Why? Perhaps because Amazon—where workers are "ground into a tired heap"—deserves to have a bad reputation.

Michael Gove, Britain's conservative Education Secretary, appears to be a bit ruffled by the quality of American literature: in a move encouraged by Gove, two works of American fiction have been removed from the national GCSE exam syllabus entirely.

This weekend's New York Times Book Review poses the following question to its "Bookends" columnists:

An old story recently resurfaced that Harvard University's library had discovered a trio of books in its collection were bound with human skin, including skin from a man who was flayed alive in the 17th century. But the most famous skin-covered book in the Ivy League isn't what seems, says Harvard's Law Library.

Michael Lewis's new book Flash Boys, about the inherent unfairness of high speed trading, is the talk of Wall Street and the financial media. The backlash to the book is a familiar refrain: "Everyone already knows that." Well, that's the point, isn't it?

Greg Gutfeld, the Joy Behar of Fox News, has a new book* out (*HAVEN'T READ) called "Not Cool: The Hipster Elite And Their War on You." What is and is not "cool," according to Greg Gutfeld? A brief guide** below.