The Franklin Park Reading Series will feature five authors at tonight’s events. Check it out at the Franklin Park Bar & Beer Garden starting 8:00 p.m. (Brooklyn, NY)

This year’s final two conversation events of  NYPL Live! will star Yes, Chef author Marcus Samuelsson and legendary writer Zadie Smith. See them at the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on December 10th and December 11th. (New York, NY)

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The tour includes four locations from the book. Users can click on these locations, which are pinpointed on a map, to launch a video that contains photos of those real life locations. An audio reading of the book plays as the text that is being read appears on the photos. Follow this link to check it out.

Here is an excerpt from the new book:

From there to here, a journey longer than it looks. For a second, this local detail holds Shar’s interest. Then she looks away, ashing her cigarette on the kitchen floor, though the door is open and the grass only a foot away. She is slow, maybe, and possibly clumsy; or she is traumatized, or distracted.

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Every Mac computer contains a copy of the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, a powerful tool for writers that features extra “word notes” from Wallace and a number of other authors, including Rae Armantrout, Joshua Ferris, Francine Prose, Zadie Smith and Simon Winchester.

Author Dave Madden explained how to access the extra material in a post: “It’s part of the built-in dictionary. Type in a word, click on ‘Thesaurus’ in the little bar above, and you’ll get the word-for-word entry from this book I paid money for … Here, as a public service, is the list of words with notes by DFW: as, all of, beg, bland, critique, dialogue, dysphesia, effete, feckless, fervent, focus, hairy, if, impossibly, individual, loan, mucous, myriad, noma (at canker), privilege, pulchritude (at beauty), that, toward, unique, utilize.”

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Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn

According to a post at The Paris Review, current web editor Thessaly La Force is leaving for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Currently, Foley-Mendelssohn serves as an assistant editor at The New Yorker. She has worked with several celebrated authors including Pulitzer Prize-winner Jennifer Egan, National Book Award-winner Jonathan Franzen, and novelist Zadie Smith. (Photo Credit: Maria Lokke)

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The 84 signatures on the original letter included: Tom Bissell, Heidi Julavits, Naomi Klein, Jonathan Lethem, and Zadie Smith. The letter asked MacArthur to seek alternative ways to reshape the magazine’s financial budget, suggesting the publisher study the models of other not-for-profit magazines.

Here’s a quote from the original letter: “Editorial costs can only be cut so far without damaging the quality of the publication … At a time when there is much chatter about the death of print, publishing a magazine as brave and creative as Harper’s Magazine verges on a sacred trust.” (Via New York Magazine & Sarah Weinman)

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This year’s New Yorker Festival took place last weekend.  Twitter fans at the festival used the hashtag, #tnyfestival.

On Saturday, Joan Acocella (author of the vampire essay, “In the Blood”) moderated the Vampires Revival panel. On board to speak were philosophy professor Noel Carroll, horror novelist Stephen King, vampire film director Matt Reeves, and Twilight screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg. A video preview of the panel discussion is embedded above.

Several dozen King fans waited outside the venue only to be disappointed by King’s unwillingness to sign books. As he walked away with his arms in the air, he told the crowd: “I can’t sign guys, I got to get something to eat.” Alas, just because he’s a “king” doesn’t mean he isn’t human.

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To find out more, GalleyCat caught up with Brandon Stout (the “book-besotted PR and design guy” from Changing Hands Bookstore). His commentary was honest and compelling, and we’ve included most of his email interview here: “Our marketing department met one afternoon with the idea that we’d ‘figure out’ eBooks once and for all, including how to bundle them with hardcover purchases–even if it meant giving them away at cost,” explained Stout.

“The more we looked, the more we found that eBook pricing wasn’t just bloated, it was erratic. No clear patterns emerged. Worse still, from publisher to publisher and from book to book we had no reliable way of determining our cost, which of course makes selling eBooks at cost problematic. Very quickly the fantasy that eBooks would be the great equalizer, that they would allow us to compete with Amazon and B&N, vanished.”

He continued: “To make bundling viable at Changing Hands–to make e-books viable for indies at all, really–it’s not enough to sell them at cost. We’d have to sell at a significant loss. Jeff Bezos, as you know, is working to recalibrate public expectation to $9.99 for e-books, and Cory Doctorow and Chris Anderson are working to recalibrate that recalibration to free. Meanwhile, as independent booksellers wait for pricing to come down and DRM issues to shake out, Amazon tightens its grip on early tech adopters — readers who will be far less likely to abandon their Kindles when indies finally limp into the game.”

After jump, Stout offers some suggestions for the future.

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During the festivities, GalleyCat caught up with Salman Rushdie (pictured, via), who just finished a screenplay draft for his classic novel, “Midnight’s Children.” The author said he was looking forward to reading a copy of Thomas Pynchon‘s “Inherent Vice” this summer. “It sounds like his most lighthearted book since Vineland,” he told this reporter, recalling a dinner he had with the reclusive Pynchon while reviewing “Vineland” for the NY Times.

“He was extremely Pynchon-eque. He was the Pynchon I wanted him to be,” explained Rushdie. He wouldn’t describe the secretive author, but wished he could have befriended Pynchon. “He never called again,” Rushdie concluded, ruefully.

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Book Bench reported from the party in Tribeca, chatting with Zadie Smith about the print magazine Eggers founded, McSweeney’s. The article reprinted Eggers’ speech and email address so worried readers around the world could send the novelist their fears.

Here’s an excerpt: “I actually have established an e-mail address, deggers@826national.org–if you want to take it down–if you are ever feeling down, if you are ever despairing, if you ever think publishing is dying or print is dying or books are dying or newspapers are dying (the next issue of McSweeney’s will be a newspaper–we’re going to prove that it can make it. It comes out in September). If you ever have any doubt, e-mail me, and I will buck you up and prove to you that you’re wrong.” (Via Gawker)

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