The great author Virginia Woolf drowned 72 years ago today. To remember her literary legacy, we’ve rounded up four free Woolf books for your Kindle, iPad or other eReader–follow the links below to download. You can find the rest of her books at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova has collected condolence letters from other authors and linked to Patti Smith‘s tribute to Woolf. Here’s an excerpt from the letters post:

On March 28, 1941, at the gruesome onset of WWII, Virginia Woolf filled the pockets of her overcoat with rocks, treaded into the River Ouse behind the house in East Sussex where she lived with her husband Leonard, and drowned herself. She had succumbed to a relapse of the all-consuming depression she had narrowly escaped in her youth. Once news of her death broke, an outpour of condolence letters captured the enormous collective grief, mourning at once the deeply personal emptiness left behind by a remarkable woman and a loyal friend, and the severe cultural loss of a brilliant mind and a transcendent artist.

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Novelist Teju Cole published “Seven short stories about drones” on Twitter, mixing in violent unmanned aerial vehicle imagery with classic first lines from literature.

Web artist Josh Begley collected the short stories in a Storify post (embedded below).

The short short stories referenced seven famous novels. We’ve linked to free copies of the books, when available. The are, in order: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Ulysses by James Joyce, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, The Trial by Franz Kafka, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and The Stranger by Albert Camus.

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To celebrate Mediabistro’s upcoming Media App Summit, we are hosting The World’s Longest Literary  Vampire Remix writing contest.

Follow this link to sign up for our new writing contest. With the help from writers around the country, we will rewrite Varney the Vampire–a bestselling vampire novel from the 19th Century filled with enough star-crossed romance, vampire action and purple prose to inspire another Twilight trilogy.

You will rewrite a small section from the book your own unique style (from poetry to Twitter updates to cartoons to imitations of your favorite writer). We will publish and distribute the final product as a free digital book through Smashwords (complete with Victorian-era illustrations) so it will be available at the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, the Diesel eBook Store, Blio.com and others.

Intrigued? You can sign up at this link. Registration closes on Oct 8, 2012.

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As the Occupy Wall Street protest continues, the activists camped out in New York City have built an impressive library. Thanks to Library Thing, you can now explore the library online and watch it grow.

The online catalog grew from 390 books on October 10 to nearly 4,000 library books today. Follow this link to find out how you can donate. We’ve listed ten books from the library below, illustrating the scope of the collection. The Occupy Wall Street librarians also hope to schedule more author visits.

Here’s more from the library blog: “Rather than having scheduled mega-events with activist authors coming to pep talk the whole occupation, I would prefer smaller, impromptu groups and a books-oriented approach to fit with our little niche mission. My idea is to ask authors to come talk about the ‘books that have inspired you’ and then whatever else they want. We can post announcements in advance on a dry erase board and/or make an announcement when someone arrives. Then, whoever happens to be around can come check it out. If it’s only a few people, I see no problem with that. Whatever stimulates conversations, and huge groups don’t allow it so much. I feel this is a good role for our library.”

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Random House imprints Crown Publishing Group (U.S.) and Chatto & Windus (U.K.) will join forces in a new fiction imprint named Hogarth. U.S. publisher Molly Stern and U.K. publishing director Clara Farmer will helm the imprint.

Some of the titles on Hogarth’s inaugural list in 2012 include: I Am Forbidden by Anouk Markovits, The Watch by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, The Dead Do Not Improve by Jay Caspian Kang, and The Kissing List by Stephanie Reents. All Hogarth books will be available in both print and digital formats.

Here’s more from the press release: “The new imprint is named in honour of The Hogarth Press, founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1917 from their home … In the U.S., Hogarth will publish between eight and ten fiction titles each year. In the U.K., Hogarth will publish a smaller list of titles annually, comprising books that are also published by Hogarth in the U.S..”

What is the agent’s role in the digital book future? Today’s guest on the Morning Media Menu was Karen Gantz, a literary agent who has represented to an impressive list of authors including Alec Baldwin and Kathleen Turner.

She explained how she founded Karen Gantz Literary Management, and was joined by her partner, Dr. Joyce Starr–talking about the agency’s author coaching services.

Gantz didn’t sugarcoat the industry while talking about the current market.

“We feel there is an even higher standard in obtaining a book deal today,” she explained. “Every week I meet with an editor on the phone or in person. There is a much higher standard because there is so much content on the web for free–publishers have to find something that’s really fresh, dynamic, and new to take a chance on an author…In Virginia Woolf‘s day, you just sent in your manuscript and it was published, no questions asked.”

She also thought agents were more important during the digital age, explaining one part of her bargaining strategy: “Many of these [contract] issues are in flux they are evolving. One of the ways to deal with it to put a provision in the contract that when these rights percentages change and the standard in the industry improves, the author will benefit from that change,” she concluded.