I learned about “thick” and “thin” during the years I worked for Time Inc. When an unusually heavy issue of Time came off the presses, executives and others in the know would smile and augur good things for the company (and, by extension, for the American economy). A particularly slender magazine brought scorn, bowed heads and concern for our job security. However, the magazine contained the same amount of editorial content each week. The difference between a thick and thin issue …

1. I recently visited a gallery in downtown New York to see Malcolm McNeill’s Ah Pook Is Here, a vast, never-published collaboration with William S. Burroughs. McNeill was a young graphic artist coming up in swinging 1960s London when a magazine called Cyclops asked him to illustrate a comic strip for a Burroughs text called The Unspeakable Mr. Hart. McNeill and Burroughs had never met when this piece was published, but Burroughs sought out the artist …

This is not good news. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a publishing group with a literary legacy dating back to 1832, is temporarily not buying new manuscripts, and apparently no longer accepting submissions from either agents or individual writers.

What does this mean? It’s difficult to tell. Browsing online sources (including Houghton Mifflin’s oblique website), I quickly got caught in amazing accounts of the history carried by today’s Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, whose previous permutations and acquisitions include Harcourt Brace, Harcourt Brace …

Please correct me if I’m missing something, but I’ve always considered V. S. Naipaul more of a monument than a writer. I make it a habit to ask friends and acquaintances what books they are excited about or which they consider lifelong favorites and I have never heard Naipaul’s name come up. The several times I’ve tried to read him I got quickly mired down in pools of self-satisfied dullness and quickly concluded that I must have picked the wrong title among his …

Legendary underground cartoonist S. Clay Wilson was found lying unconscious on a San Francisco street, possibly the victim of a hit-and-run or a mugging. He is in serious condition (but improving) at San Francisco General Hospital, but will not be able to pay his medical bills. Jeff Weinberg of Water Row Books (which has supported his work for decades) sends this note:

“I have started to ask my customers to help S. Clay Wilson by donating whatever small amount they …

1. MILTON MARATHON! At St. Olaf College (and yes, the name does make me think of Rose from The Golden Girls; I can’t help it), a professor led a straight-through reading of Paradise Lost. The article says, “Milton is not as boring as you think. Paradise Lost has something for everyone: Hot but innocent sex! (You thought Adam and Eve spent all their time in Eden gardening?) Descriptions of hellfire that would make The Lord of the Rings’ archfiend, Sauron, weep with envy! Epic …

I had a great time at the National Book Awards ceremony last year, but I’m skipping the show this year, partly because I can’t get excited by these nominations. I’m predicting that Marilynne Robinson will win for Home and Jane Mayer will win for The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, but neither possibility has me jumping up and down. As far as I’m concerned, this year’s fiction award …

1. If you grew up ordering slim paperbacks in school from Scholastic Book Services, you’ll enjoy this Flickr set as much as I do (via).

2. Neil Young has written an article for the Huffington Post about how the Detroit auto industry can radically alter its corporate culture by embracing green innovation. Young is clearly a transportation freak — aside from his work with Lionel Trains and Linc Volt, he also once wrote “Long May You Run”, a sweet love …

There are two ways to talk about the new “Letters of Ted Hughes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $45), edited by Christopher Reid. The first is to approach Hughes’s correspondence as an illuminating aesthetic record, the clearest insight we’re likely to get into the mind of a poet viewed by some critics as one of the major writers of the 20th Century. The second way is to discuss, well, “It”.

Here’s a third way: what the fuck is up with a $45 price tag on …

Diane Kurys has directed a film biography of rebellious French writer Francoise Sagan, titled simply Sagan. Perhaps inspired by the success of La Vie En Rose, a recent biopic of Edith Piaf, the new film stars Sylvie Testud (who played Piaf’s friend in La Vie en Rose), and follows the story of Francoise Sagan from the publication of her first book to her final days in Normandy.

Francoise Quoirez –- she took the nom de plume Sagan after the Princesse de Sagan, a …