Last week songwriter Tracey Thorn, who's best known for her work in the musical duo Everything But the Girl, released her memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star in the U.S. It's a witty and charming chronicle of a career full of happy accidents and success found in the least likely of places — like clubland, which the formerly acoustic-based duo took by storm in 1995 when legendary house producer Todd Terry remixed their "Missing" and the results yielded a global smash.

A recently uncovered essay by Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other things on your fifth grade summer reading list, shows that the Scottish writer was kind of a curmudgeon when it came to his contemporaries. Basically, he thought they were such a drag.

Randi Zuckerberg is writing two books — one to guide you, and one to guide your children.

Though it's been years since the last book's release, Harry Potter is getting itself a little makeover.

Drop whatever you're doing unless it's made of glass and clear a smallish, rectangular space on your coffee table; Amy Poehler is writing a book.

Last night, on the eve of the release of her Remembering Whitney book, Whitney Houston's mother Cissy sat down with and croaked at Oprah Winfrey for a very special episode of Oprah's Next Chapter. Crankily honest, Cissy discussed the longstanding rumor that Whitney was involved in a romantic relationship with her best friend and one-time executive assistant Robyn Crawford. In the book, Cissy alludes to Whitney "experiment[ing]" with this friendship. She told Oprah that she just didn't like Robyn. "She just spoke too much…disrespectful sometimes," she explained. But the real brutality came as a result of Oprah asking Cissy if it would have bothered her if Whitney were gay.

The national book store chain Borders folded in 2011, leaving Barnes & Noble as the undisputed king of Big Huge Chain Bookstores. In that specific industry, B&N has had no competition for the past year and a half. Yet they are preparing to downsize anyhow. The Big Huge Chain Bookstore golden era has passed.

Practically every literate human has entertained the idea of writing a novel. For most of us the idea fades as soon as something good comes on TV. But imagine if you wrote short stories for a living. Imagine if you wrote dozens of incredible short stories over almost twenty years and became the world's most famous living short story writer, but still never published a novel. Wouldn't you really really want to write a novel? In other words: Why the hell hasn't George Saunders—New York Times-certified "Writer of Our Time"—written a novel?

A Manly, Australia library is moving all of Lance Armstrong's books to their fiction section, following his admission that he used performance-enhancing drugs and blood transfusions during his historic run of Tour de France victories.

Teju Cole, the novelist, essayist, art historian and master tweeter, wrote seven short stories about drones — the unmanned aerial vehicles used by the U.S. for covert assassination in foreign countries — on his Twitter feed yesterday. Here they are.

"I set out to write a memoir that was a love letter to a man I was deeply in love with, a man who challenged me in myriad ways, a man who changed my life profoundly, a man I respected and honored greatly at the time," Alisa Valdes wrote on her blog on Wednesday. She was talking about her book The Feminist and the Cowboy: An Unlikely Love Story. "[W]hat I actually wrote was a handbook for women on how to fall in love with a manipulative, controlling, abusive narcissist. [...] I feel I owe it to my loyal readers and fans to be truthful now. It is the decent thing to do."

McDonald's is set to become the United Kingdom's biggest book distributor, offering children's books as the world's shittiest "toy" that comes with its Happy Meals.

What we lost: Romantic comedies
Who took it: Audiences, Gerard Butler, Tucker Max, Netflix, sequel-based franchises. Vulture charts the steady decline:

When there's nothing else to feel proud of, at least you can tell yourself, "Hey, I am an above-average American book reader, god damn it." Are you? Here are the latest stats, from the Pew Research Center:

Rich girl Lena Dunham sold a book of "frank and funny advice on everything from sex to eating to traveling to work" to Random House for $3.7 million in October on the strength of an illustrated 66-page proposal. Here it is, weighing in at $56,000 or so per page.

Random House, the publisher of Fifty Shades of Grey and (every other fact is irrelevant), announced at its holiday party last night that every American employee—thousands of them, anyone who's been with company for a year—will be getting a $5,000 Christmas bonus. "The cheering went on for minutes," says the NYT.

We can probably go ahead and add this to next year's Gift Guide for People Who Still Read Books: Dick Cheney is writing a book about his many, many heart surgeries (and five heart attacks). The former vice president is co-authoring the book with his cardiologist, Dr. Jonathan Reiner, and his daughter, Liz Cheney.

Last week, we asked you how you reconcile the precarious position of having to buy a gift for someone you hate. This was a joke question that brought out a lot of truth, which was nice. Thank you for sharing your stories and suggestions. I do not hate you for that and would buy you a straightforwardly nice gift if I knew you. Our favorites are below.

Last week we asked for your suggestions of what "books" (i.e. ancient Kindles made of wood pulp and ink and with the capacity to store only one title) to get your loved ones for Christmas. Here are some of your suggestions.

There's a hidden curse to being a current or former top editor at the New York Times. Yes, you've held one of the most powerful positions in journalism. But who is going to edit you? Nobody, not very stringently, at least. So we find that when current or former NYT editors engage in writing for their paper, it often could have used a heavy round of editing, into the trashcan.