Inside Jacket

Writing by hand, as opposed to by keyboard, is better for the learning process.

How word lengths evolve.

n+1 on what elitism means today.

Extreme book-jacket design.

Want to write an airport novel? Here’s how to untangle a plot.

It is the time wasted for the subway that makes it so important: Union Square gets a brief Saint-Exupérian makeover.

Emma Watson will star in Stephen Chbosky’s adaptation of his “Perks of Being a Wallflower.”

MoMA has acquired twenty-three typefaces. Take a look.

Never say never: a ninety-nine year old Japanese woman becomes a best-selling poet.

The other book of O: an investigation of Oprah, American religion, and daytime TV.

The Virginia Quarterly Review honors its best.

From TNR: Did Oprah get Dickens all wrong?

Laura Miller on why we love consuming literary clichés.

Narrative problem? Call in the experts: Margaret Atwood and Sam Lipsyte workshop President Obama’s political storyline.

Seven Stories Press will publish a memoir by Stieg Larsson’s life-partner, Eva Gabrielsson.

For sale: an orange Mini Cooper filled with seventy-five Penguin books and a dashboard signed by Garrison Keillor, Geraldine Brooks, Michael Pollan, and Sue Monk Kidd.

What Lord Byron can teach us about literary celebrity.

Former NPR news analyst Juan Williams will write about free speech in the first of two books to be published by Random House’s Crown imprint.

Rousing verse: do poets belong on the front lines or the sidelines of political protests?

Elaine Showalter reviews Susan Cheever’s new biography of Louisa May Alcott.

A lost fragment of a Leonardo da Vinci manuscript has been rediscovered in a French public library.

“An adventure in cultural history”: James Gleick on the O.E.D.’s new nine-thousand-four-hundred-word definition of “Information.”

A Chinese publisher recalls an edition of Grimm’s fairy tales after translating a Japanese erotic version of the book by mistake.

“I put a tip jar on my signing table and I made over $4,000″: David Sedaris explains how to make book tours fun.

Heaving bosoms, discretely: why the romance e-book market is thriving.

Amazon will make Nielsen BookScan’s nationwide sales data available to authors on its site.

Why do we always say the butler did it? In mystery writing, he never actually did?

Michael Chabon has been elected chairman of the MacDowell Colony.

What can we still learn from a Victorian “How-To” guide to writing fiction?

Foursquare unveils a “bookworm” badge for frequenters of libraries and bookstores.

Beyond Stieg Larsson: why foreign governments and foundations are subsidizing efforts to get Americans to read more books in translation.

The year’s best guilty reads.

Another biography? How Paul McCartney became the “Most Uninteresting Person Ever to Inspire a Mountain of Literature.”

Coming soon: “Clifford the Big Red Dog,” the musical.

Is Yiddish literature the next big thing?

Quiz: match the authors to their favorite books from this year.

Coming soon: Penguin Classics in Arabic.

In the age of globalization, do national writers still exist?

“Smart people say very stupid things about Canadian poetry”: Michael Lista on the problem with literary critics and why growing poets is a lot like growing truffles.

A roundup of new books about higher education.

Beware the lush and lulling description: Ayelet Waldman on the dangers of “bore-geous” writing.

Five hundred years before the Internet, scholars worried about information overload. What can we learn from the Renaissance’s best indexers?

Christopher Hitchens’s search for the ultimate novel about Washington, D.C.

The Discovery Channel releases its first comic book, “Top 10 Deadliest Sharks.”

The Russian poet Bella Akhmadulina has died at the age of seventy-three.