It's a packed week for the bookish types, with a couple of our favorite love-to-hate-them New York novelists on the readings circuit. Yeah, we're talking about the Jonathans. On Wednesday (2/22) Lethem is hosting a short-story evening at Symphony Space (W. 92nd St. and Broadway), with stories by James Thurber, Italo Calvino, and Jorge Luis Borges read by Malachy McCourt, Maria Tucci and Isaiah Sheffer. The show starts at 8PM and costs $21/25. And not......

Todd Zuniga, Opium Magazine...

In the Times' City section, there was a story by Thomas Beller about how his iPod fell as he was getting onto a train - slipping between the subway car and the platform edge onto the tracks. And so he went to pick it up. Oh, yes, he did: I waited until the train and the two that followed it were finally gone. The iPod lay there on the floor of the tracks. The......

The publishing world is abuzz upon news of the Amazon error that showed reviewers' true identities (bad, technology, bad!) which, as Gawker aptly put it, "gave a little peek into the world of friends pimping friends' books and bitter unpublished writers trashing other writers. (It seems Amazon is sort of like, oh, any street corner in lower Manhattan.)" David Eggers was revealed to have written a review pimping friend Heidi Julavits' The Effects of Living......

Reading Thomas Beller's Newsweek essay about George Plimpton - part sweet remembrance of the man and part riff on the challenges of having a literary magazine, a la The Paris Review, or Open City, which is Beller's concern, we noticed a typo on his bio: "...Beller is the author of 'The Sleep-Overt Artist,' a novel..." which could very well be that title of some young literary hipster's book about a narcoleptic, but the actual title......