An epic battle for control of the Internet was waged Friday night under the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge. n+1 editor and novelist Keith Gessen threw a party to "Take Back the Internet." He basically invited everyone who has ever been mean to him online, as well as readers of his Tumblr, which is mostly aimed at hostile blog commenters. And so Hamilton, Pareene, and I had no choice but to head over to DUMBO and fight for the Internet.

"You know how Gawker is always ragging on Bard College, how they're so weird and all?" asks a reader. Why yes, we do! Bard College, the liberal arts school located 120 miles north in Annandale-on-Hudson, "puts the 'liberal' in 'liberal arts,'" according to the Princeton Review. We used to have a delightful column from a Bard student, all about skinny jeans and crying! "Well, I sent [a dark short story] to their literary magazine [Conjunctions]... Bard rejected it because they were too busy preparing their issue on the topic of DEATH. They further suggested I resubmit something else and—for good measure—they stuffed the whole article back into my SASE. It came with 51 cents postage due."

n+1 magazine—the most important literary magazine of our time—is presenting a very special evening on "The Internet: We All Live There Now." Moe from our sister site Jezebel will be speaking, as will n+1 editors Benjamin Kunkel and Mark Greif. Among other things, they'll "debate the implications of anonymity for bloggers and those who comment on the blogs they write." It's tonight at 7pm at the Kitchen. Be there with bells on! [Flavorpill]

Sometimes, the future is right in front of your face. Three years ago, there was a different n+1 (the most important literary journal of our time) dude publishing a much-vaunted, yet sorely disappointing first novel featuring immature young men fumbling their way with tragically smart women who are only with them due to the startling lack of suitable males in New York. It was Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision. This weekend, a reader snapped a photo of it at Barnes and Noble in Hyannis, Massachusetts, on fire-sale at the "Under $5" table... next to Michael Crichton. (Click to enlarge.)

As we told you before, author and McSweeney's founder Dave Eggers is curating an art show! A very important, very humorous art show. Paddy from Art Fag City went to the opening! Well, she stood in line at the opening...

Dave Eggers, author and founder of exhaustingly clever literary mag McSweeney's, is curating an art show! It opens next Wednesday at apexart. (We'll be there with bells on; we hear there will be a Basquiat.) UnBeige says, "according Eggers, the show ended up consisting of 'usually very basic or crude' drawings that are accompanied by hand-drawn text that functions like a funny caption." Muses Eggers in the press release, "Is humor allowed in art, and in what forms? Are captions allowed in art, and why?" Captions! If that's not art, we don't know what is. Click to see this work by David Shrigley, writ large. [via UnBeige]

The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes landed on our desk today, and damned it we couldn't use a laugh right now! But are there any to be had? The first bad sign is the book's design: the back of the book, with bar code, etc., is actually on the front. Ha-ha. Get it? And then, on the other side, there is a raw chicken (turkey?) leaning against a wall, smoking a cigarette through the hole left by its decapitated head. Uh... We'll excerpt a few jokes, and you may decide if they're funny, or just funny-heh.

The launch party for the second issue of the hefty literary-art annual magazine Sienese Shredder was last night. It was more of a drinking affair; the "intellectual launch" was last month, one gentleman told me. What happens at an intellectual launch? "People read things." Oh! The magazine features unpublished work from artist Jasper Johns and director Guy Maddin, among others. Excerpted is the delightful article, "Pornotopias and Pornocopias" on how libraries organize their porn collections.

August literary magazine Virginia Quarterly Review's blog did a survey, discovering that cliché-ridden poetry submissions get published more often than not. They thought they were above that, avoiding clichés like the plague, but alas: "This was supposed to be a blog entry about how authors submit poetry to us covering clichéd topics that there's just no way we're going to print. But then I did the math... and found that precisely the opposite is true." Let's take a look at the cliché-roundup, by percentage:

Writerly power-couple Tom Jenks (former fiction editor at Esquire, GQ and Scribner's), and novelist Carol Edgarian (Rise of the Euphrates), are profiled by the SF Chronicle about their literary-online magazine, Narrative. It has "selections from writer friends such as Jane Smiley, Tobias Wolff and Joyce Carol Oates;" its goal is "to connect more readers to more literary writers." It is literally subtitled "The Future of Reading." (The future of reading still involves Joyce Carol Oates and the Internet?) Sixty-five people volunteer for Narrative without pay, including big shots like Michael Wiegers of Copper Canyon press, a poetry publisher. So why exactly is the future of literary writing online?

Dave Eggers's semi-precious literary magazine, McSweeney's, seek senryu and pantoums submissions for their next issue; "no other forms of poetry will be considered that this time." Now you're all wondering what those are, right?

We, like you perhaps, received this message in our "e-mail" inbox, from the twee literary magazine of one Dave Eggers: "It's a month of major things—a new quarterly, a new novel, and a new Wholphin are all bursting forth, via our website , yearning to be sent your way by the brave men and women of our warehouse, who right now are emerging from their cryogenic chambers and taking in nutrient-rich fluids in order to prepare for this fabled late-February triple-delivery. The major news networks are, inexplicably, not covering any of this, but here is what we can tell you: McSweeney's 26, first of all, is itself three separate objects, two books of short fiction featuring tornadoes, child reporters, Amanda Davis, and someone called the Black Shaman, and one volume of dead-serious dossiers, based on actual Pentagon documents, outlining how the United States might justify its next round of wars." DIAL DOWN THE CUTENESS OVERLOAD, m'kay, guys?

Is Granta still the best place to look for new, excellent novelists, asks the Times of London? Apparently not, even though Granta published their 100th issue this month. The incredibly precious McSweeney's, published by Dave Eggers, is the new heavyweight contender. It's gone from "an idiosyncratic literary magazine to a new-look publishing empire."

Journalist and legendary party-thrower George Plimpton wasn't one of the original founders of litmagazine the Paris Review, corrects Immy Humes, daughter of H.L. "Doc" Humes. The so-called "hipster visionary neo-prophet" was among the original "instigators" of the publication. Plimpton, the first editor in chief, arrived shortly thereafter. Well, whatever! She's pluggin' a movie about her dad. [WNYC]

"What the World Needs Now is Another Literary Magazine Like I Need a Hole In My Head." [The Harpoonist]