Jason Rekulak has been promoted to publisher of Quirk Books. In addition, Brett Cohen has been promoted to president at Quirk Books and David Borgenicht will take the role of Quirk Productions CEO.

Rekulak acquired and edited many of the house’s bestsellers including the mash-up title Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and the young adult novel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.

A number of other publishing organizations have also announced promotions this week…

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Ever wish you could help your favorite novelist finish writing a story?

Over at Goodreads, a team of authors played a game of exquisite corpse and wrote part of a short story together. Participating authors included Charles Yu, Robin Sloan, Anne Lamott and Ally Condie. Now you can help them finish the story:

What’s the best way to celebrate May’s National Short Story Month? With a brand-new short story, of course! We’ve enlisted 15 brave and brilliant authors, starting with Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan, for a bout of Exquisite Corpse—the classic parlor game popularized by the Surrealists, wherein each participant continues a story based only on the previous person’s lines. All of the writers are seeing the full story for the first time with this post, but our Internet experiment isn’t over. Last up was the legendary Margaret Atwood, and now it’s your turn. Keep the game going in the comments section!

The Colbert Report host Stephen Colbert plans to launch “cOlbert’s Book Club.”

For the first installment of this humorous “rip off” of Oprah Winfrey‘s book club, Colbert plans to discuss The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jennifer Egan and filmmaker Baz Luhrmann will be his first guests on Thursday, May 9th. The video embedded above contains the full announcement–what do you think?

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Why do you write? Author Meredith Maran asked 20 great writers that question, collecting their replies in her new collection, Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and Why They Do What They Do. 

On the Morning Media Menu today, Maran shared writing advice she learned while getting responses from Isabel Allende, David Baldacci, Jennifer Egan, Sebastian Junger and Ann Patchett.

Press play below to listen to the whole interview on SoundCloud. We’ve collected a few quotes from the interview as well…

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The Hollywood Reporter has picked the top 25 Most Powerful Authors in Hollywood.

The top five writers on the list are all literary band names. Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, Nicholas Sparks, EL James and Suzanne Collins hold the top five spots, respectively. However, the magazine also listed a number of “Authors To Look Out For,” a list filled with up-and-coming authors. We’ve rounded up those top six writers below…

Here’s more about the list: “THR selected those living authors who have been most successful in shepherding their books from page to screen, balancing success in publishing (total output, sales, best-sellers) and in Hollywood (completed adaptations, projects in development, screenwriting and producing credits) while accounting for cultural influence. More power to them.”

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For your weekend reading pleasure, here are our top stories of the week, including Stephen King‘s upcoming mystery novel, Jennifer Egan‘s sci-fi story on Twitter and the trailer for the upcoming adaptation of the Les Miserables (embedded above).

Click here to sign up for GalleyCat’s daily email newsletter, getting all our publishing stories, book deal news, videos, podcasts, interviews, and writing advice in one place.

1. How to Share Books & eBooks with Our Troops
2. Free Sites to Promote Your eBook
3. Write a Novel This Summer with NaNoWriMo
4. Neil Gaiman Shares ‘Secret Freelancer Knowledge’ in Graduation Speech
5. 50 Shades of Grey Sales Bump: INFOGRAPHIC
6. Don’t Let the Writing Life Kill You
7. Stephen King: ‘We’re Going to Hold Off on e-Publishing This One’
8. Les Miserables Teaser Trailer Released
9. Book Cover Design Resources for Self-Published Authors
10. Jennifer Egan to Publish Sci-Fi Story on Twitter

Novelist Jennifer Egan will publish a complete science fiction story on The New Yorker Fiction Twitter feed over the next few nights.

The New York Observer reported that the experiment will begin tonight at 8 p.m. ET. Egan (pictured)  has experimented in her fiction before, writing a short story disguised as a list and publishing PowerPoint fiction for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. Back in 2009, Electric Literature performed a similar experiment with novelist Rick Moody.

Here’s more from the author: “This is not a new idea, of course, but it’s a rich one—because of the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and because of the odd poetry that can happen in a hundred and forty characters. I found myself imagining a series of terse mental dispatches from a female spy of the future, working undercover by the Mediterranean Sea. I wrote these bulletins by hand in a Japanese notebook that had eight rectangles on each page. The story was originally nearly twice its present length; it took me a year, on and off, to control and calibrate the material into what is now ‘Black Box.’” (Link via MB Newsfeed; image via Marion Ettlinger)

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The lineup for the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature has been revealed.  The annual event will be held in New York City from April 30th through May 6th.

Novelist and PEN World Voices chair Salman Rushdie will deliver the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture this year. The festival will feature Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster, Graydon Carter, Michael Cunningham, Jennifer Egan, E.L. Doctorow, Tony Kushner, Herta Müller, Marjane Satrapi, Colson Whitehead and many other writers.

Rushdie had this statement in the release: “In an era of ever-expanding ‘screen-time,’ live/in-person readings, conversations and literary performances have never been more radical or more necessary … These live events break down the invisible walls that separate us into our own solitary computer pods and re-assert the importance of dialogue, activism, and community without borders.”

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So far, more than 1,300 writers have signed a new Writers in Support of the Occupy Movement petition.

The petition is composed of a single sentence: “We, the undersigned writers and all who will join us, support Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world.” The site now includes short essays by different writers, including Francine Prose, Lemony Snicket, D.A. Powell, Duncan Murrell, Anne Waldman, Danica Novgorodoff and Michael Voll, Maureen Miller, Daphne Carr, Alice Walker, Paula Z. Segal, John McManus, David Hollander, Blair Braverman, Scott Sparling, and Joshua Cohen.

So far, the petition has virtual signatures from Alison Bechdel, Samuel R. Delaney, Jennifer Egan, Barbara Ehrenreich, Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Lethem, Ann Patchett, Salman Rushdie and many other authors. You can sign at the bottom of the page, but the organizers are processing a huge influx of signatures.

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Both Knopf and Doubleday and have joined Spotify, building hand-picked music lists for their authors. The site includes a number of playlists, including mixes from Colson Whitehead, Erin Morgenstern, and Jennifer Egan.

Follow this link to get a Spotify invite for the free service. We also recommend you check our “How to Control Your Facebook Apps” post to make sure you are happy with your privacy settings. We’ve already built “12 Spotify Playlists for Writers.”

Here’s more about Whitehead’s playlist for Zone One: “The undead take Manhattan in this literary and literal feast from award-winning author Colson Whitehead. The author selected these 10 songs to set the scene for his postmodern meditation on exterminating zombies in Manhattan.” (Via K.B. Abele)