“Blake was all bullshit except for the bomb.”

You might think that the co-author of Fiesta: How to Survive the Bulls of Pamplona would be able to partake in the Spanish city’s annual event without suffering any injuries. Unfortunately for Bill Hillmann, that’s not the case.

Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!, (who I interviewed last February) is having a very good year. She has a spot on the NYT list of the 10 Best Books of 2011, and last month HBO optioned the novel for what they describe as a “half hour comedy series.”

n+1’s Research Collective has posted the introduction to Ellen Willis’s No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (1992), and plans to post a series of essays by the seamless activist and writer– “Her refusal to subsume her personality to a movement, or to ignore the things that were important to her, remains an inspiration.”

U.S. publishing house Little, Brown had a rough day in the news yesterday. Its coy marketing tactics have rubbed some booksellers the wrong way, reports Julie Bosman for The New York Times. Later on, The New York Post‘s Keith J. Kelly noted that the publisher has dropped one of its bigger titles. Jason Bennett raises some additional questions.