Inside Jacket

“You say tomato, I say TCP/IP”: Google publishes its first e-book, “20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web.” But what happened to Google Editions?

Tom Waits will publish a collection of poems about homelessness in collaboration with the photojournalist Michael O’Brien.

University presses are treading water; to survive, they may need to reinvent themselves.

Would you pay twelve dollars to have your pencils sharpened?

“I think he’s what you might call a psychomorph”: Anne R. Dick on the “biography dressed like a memoir” that she’s written about her ex-husband, Philip K. Dick.

For the reader in a hurry: How to read Mark Twain’s seven hundred and thirty-eight page autobiography in a single day.

Archeologists have discovered a secret chamber, untouched for two centuries, inside India’s National Library.

The M.T.A. now offers service to… Hogwarts? A new train sign appears in New York’s Union Square subway station.

Just in time for Thanksgiving dinner, five literary discussion starters.

Censorship on campus: Why are college students burning books?

The best books about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

What happens to all of the books sent to the president of Harvard University as gifts?

Norris Church Mailer died Sunday at the age of sixty-one. Lawrence Schiller reflects on her relationship with Norman Mailer.

Jonathan Safran Foer on the book as object.

Two standup comedians adapt Kafka’s “The Trial” for the London stage.

Newsweek tours the David Foster Wallace archive.

Claudia Dey on how to become a sex writer.

Edmund Morris, the author of three Theodore Roosevelt biographies, on what Teddy would make of twenty-first-century America.

All is not lost: what President Obama might learn from the Book of Job.

Is it O.K. or okay? Roy Blount, Jr., reviews Allan Metcalf’s “OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word.”

In his new book, Pope Benedict XVI says that condom use might be justified for male prostitutes seeking to prevent the spread of disease.

Literary boozing: where writers like to drink.

Salman Rushdie’s favorite fantasy books.

Why do cookbook authors so often underestimate the time it takes to prepare a meal?

Move over, Shakespeare: how the King James Bible shaped the English language.

Save a tree: a holiday gift guide for rainforest-friendly books.

Are video games the future of journalism?

“There is nothing more beautiful in our material world than the book”: Patti Smith upon winning the National Book Award for non-fiction.

And the other winners: Jaimy Gordon, Kathryn Erskine, and Terrance Hayes.

How Cynthia Ozick exorcized Henry James.

What happens when an antiquarian bookstore receives eight ounces of marijuana in the mail?

The best and worst literary puns.

Decoded: Jay-Z talks to Terry Gross about his earliest rhymes.

Mark Peters on the many meanings of “gay”: is the word off-limits?

For some struggling writers, the lucrative video game industry beckons.

“Did John Irving ever have to do this?” Tawni O’Dell on posing as a wood nymph and other indignities in the life of the serious female novelist.

In a previously unpublished interview, John Updike discusses Nabokov, the novel after 9/11, and how he managed to write so much.

Is no female playwright worthy of this year’s Wendy Wasserstein Prize for playwriting?

“So when thou hast, as I / Commanded thee, done blabbing”: Robert Pinsky on the poetic takedown.

Why pushing children toward the “right sort” of literature can put them off of it for life.

“Learn to differentiate between scotch and bourbon”: how to drink writer’s block away.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan will star in a new film adaptation of “The Great Gatsby.”

A new Web site lets would-be readers explain their decision to buy or not buy certain e-books.

Our narratives, ourselves: science reveals how we create a sense of self through the stories we tell.

Five authors explain how they got, kept, and fired their agents.