Welcome to 2011! What do we call this decade, anyway? Who will win the Super Bowl? What will become of health care reform? How many New York City snowplows does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Some questions are impossible to answer. But we asked our favorite writers an easy one: What book will you read on New Year’s Day? …more

“In America, we tend to think belief trumps knowledge. To tease out the truth from the fabric of lies that surrounds us requires a certain degree of intelligence. Which is bad news for us, alas.” …more

“The Long Haul” is dedicated to exploring the paths writers have taken, and the choices they’ve made, the indignities and frustrations as well as the joys and rewards of the writing life. What follows is the second essay in the series, this one from Rumpus Books Editor Andrew Altschul. …more

Today, in Books, Andrea Scrima reviews Jessica Treadway’s latest collection, Please Come Back to Me. Treadway won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 2009. Read the review.

A funny thing happened on the way to the “angry grrrl rock revolution which seeks to save the psychic and cultural lives of girls and women everywhere”… …more

Rumpus Books asked some of our favorite writers what they will be reading as we leave the aughts behind and sally forth into a new decade. …more

Ray was failing at being a person. He’d been fooled by life. It had triumphed over him. I wanted to call out to him, over his wife’s head, Hey Ray, life has triumphed over you. …more

Rumpus books editor, Andrew Altschul, has edited a new anthology of flash fiction. Fivers: Flash Fiction for the Phone includes stories by Rumpus columnist Kaui Hart Hemings, as well as Lemony Snicket, Joshua Furst, and others. Here’s a sample. …more

In her new short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie moves back and forth between two continents the way she has in real life. Adichie depicts contemporary middle class Nigeria, as well as the lives of Nigerian women newly arrived in the United States—wives, girlfriends of Americans, au pairs—adjusting to a new country.

Listen to an interview with Adichie, by Zoë Pollock of The News Hour with Jim Lehrer‘s blog, Art Beat.

Steven Soderbergh’s new movie combines porn’s storylessness with the brutality and bad improv of Reality tv, in an assault on complexity and honesty. …more

Ah, the lovely march of Spring… Who can deny the splendor and joy that May hath wrought? …more

This week, Rumpus Books published reviews of new novels, short story collections, and volumes of poetry, and capped off National Poetry Month with a Supersized Rumpus Original Combo (or S-ROC, as we like to call it) with poet D.A. Powell. …more

National Poetry Month is over, but you can still read great poetry on The Rumpus. We published a new poem every day in April, including work from D.A. Powell, Michelle Tea, Sean Hill, T.R. Hummer, Carolyn Guinzio, Brian Teare, Elizabeth Bradfield, Randall Mann, and many others. In the future, we’ll continue to publish original poems in our Rumpus Original Poems column. Because at The Rumpus (… wait for it…), every month is National Poetry Month!

This one’s not a joke.

Poet Craig Arnold has been missing in Japan for three days. The latest news we’ve heard is that the U.S. has sent helicopters and personnel to assist local authorities in searching a small volcanic island where he had been hiking. We’ll update this story as we hear more information.

Famed producer Quincy Jones has asked President Obama to establish a cabinet-level position for culture and the arts. An online petition already has almost 300,000 signatures. Add your name to the list!

The future of book reviewing is online.

I say this not as a cheerleader for all things hi-tech (hell, I don’t even own an iPod), nor as some prophet of the post-physical book, but because the model of book reviewing we’re used to – delivered by the priestly class of critics; limited by paper, ink, column inches; determined by the latest microtrend and by who an author’s agent had lunch with – is clearly history. …more

Usually, if I read a review of a book and think it sounds like something I’d love, it isn’t. A recent exception is Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, surely one of the strangest novels of recent years. Though the name of Jorge Luis Borges frequently comes up with regards to Galchen’s novel, I think that’s a red herring, a side-effect of part of Atmospheric Disturbances taking place in Argentina; the real name here is Vladimir Nabokov, whose tutelage on the infinite plasticity and intrinsic conflicts of point of view Galchen has chewed up, digested, and spat out to terrifying effect. …more

The Rumpus dispatched dozens of our top reporters to Chicago. None of them were heard from again. …more

The National Book Critics Circle has started an online petition to save The Washington Post’s Book World.

After months of speculation, and a piece in The New Yorker‘s “Talk of the Town,” it’s official: …more

Rumpus Books asked dozens of writers what they’ll be reading on New Year’s Day, 2009. Here’s what they said:

…more

Marie Arana, the longtime editor of The Washington Post’s Book World is stepping down tomorrow. “For 15 years I have had the privilege and honor …more

What makes the Holocaust such a juicy target for literary exaggeration …more

From The New York Times: In these times of plummeting consumer confidence and evaporating labor markets, it is time to address the problem head on. We must now go boldly forward and bail out the writers. Read more…

I Have Fun Everywhere I Go

Memoirs can be split into two rough camps: those that place their narrator front and center, and those focused on external events. The former narcissistically inflates its protagonist, even when describing misbehavior or abjection – it says my experience is exemplary, my challenges or tragedies can illuminate your life. It’s an arrogant form, badly abused and overmarketed of late. …more

Less than a year after Houghton Mifflin bought Harcourt, the new entity – Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – seems to be collapsing. Two weeks ago, it was announced – and then retracted, and then sorta-kinda reannounced – that HMH was freezing acquisitions (i.e. not buying anymore books). Yesterday, Rebecca Saletan, who unseated longtime Houghton publisher Janet Silver last spring, resigned as publisher of HMH.

Today, Galleycat reports that executive editor Ann Patty has been fired, along with an unspecified number of other employees.

Rumors point to an eventual sale of the trade division, which publishes luminaries like Philip Roth and Umberto Eco, as well as new stars like Padma Viswanathan, by its Irish owners, Education Media and Publishing Group.

This comes as major restructuring is announced at Random House and Knopf, leading one to ask, inevitably, was Chicken Little right?

Update: Double Day is also having some problems.

Got an hour to listen to an amazing short story? Watch this year’s Pulitzer Prize poet, and former U.S. Poet Laureate, introduce Cornelia Nixon, who reads her short story, “Beach Bunnies,” at UC Berkeley’s Story Hour, on November 6, 2008.