Denis Johnson, whose epic novel Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) won the 2007 National Book Award in fiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, will begin testing new literary waters this summer with a serial novel, written on deadline for and published in installments in Playboy.

On Wednesday, John Ashbery and Robin Blaser were named the winners of the eighth annual Griffin Poetry Prize, awarded to both a Canadian and an international author or translator for a book of poetry published in English during the previous year. 

The home where Mark Twain penned classics such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court may be shutting its doors to the public, as the nonprofit organization that has shaped the property into a cultural center has encountered what may be the final blows in a recent deluge of financial troubles, the New York Times reported yesterday.

The woman Laura Albert enlisted to publicly impersonate JT LeRoy, the fictional author created by Albert whose non-identity was exposed in 2005, will publish her own account of the hoax, the New York Post reported today. Twenty-seven-year-old Savannah Knoop, the half sister of Albert's former partner Geoffrey Knoop, has written Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy, her memoir of socializing with celebrities while posing, complete with sunglasses and blond wig, as the author of Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, works purportedly based on the author's experiences as a twelve-year-old homeless, abused, and drug-addicted son of a prostitute. Seven Stories Press will publish Knoop's book in October.