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Tina Brown Asks Philip Roth About the Future of the Novel from The Daily Beast Video on Vimeo.

Fall is a great time of year for books. It’s the run-up to the holiday season, a time when lots of new titles appear and lots of publishing news is made. So here’s a roundup:

The Huffington Post recently began a books section that’s now my new favorite on the web. It has a wide assortment of articles, from readers’ and editors’ picks to the bestseller price wars between Amazon, Walmart and Target, to the top ten anti-heroes, from Pippi Longstocking and Scarlett O’Hara to Tom Ripley and Artemis Fowl. (I’d like to make a personal plug for Becky Sharp of Vanity Fair and Soames Forsyte of The Man of Property, part of the Forsyte Saga.)

I’ve been disappointed with coverage at The Daily Beast, which started out strong and has been scaled back. Articles stay up there for weeks at a time and some of the sections have been eliminated. The video above, an interview with Philip Roth and Tina Brown, is the first author video I’ve seen out there in months now.

I’ve never liked Philip Roth, but he has a new book out, and the always entertaining Tina Brown interviewed him, so I thought I’d see what he had to say about the future of the novel. After this video, I like him even less. Roth, predictably, says that the novel is dead, that it can’t compete with screens. There are more video excerpts from Brown’s interview with Roth at the links above.

The New Yorker’s surprisingly uninteresting Fall books special does have one highlight, Ellis Weiner’s depressing yet hilarious take on the current state of affairs in book marketing. It’s in the form of a letter from the publicity department of Propensity Publishing, and includes this gem:

immediately on Saturday (!) all of editorial (Janet, plus probably Michelle, her assistant) and I go to the Frankfurt Book Fair for a week. During that time the office will be closed, although to help cover the costs of the Germany trip it will actually be sublet to the John Lindsay Elementary School P.T.A. as a rehearsal space for this year’s fund-raiser production of “The Music Man.”

Poets & Writers’ November/December issue just arrived, and it’s got some great stuff, including a profile of Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife and her newly released second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, and a piece by Ben Percy on persevering through the rejections during the submission process. He even describes his spreadsheet of first- through fourth-tier magazines and journals and how he use it when sending out short fiction.

I’ve been lucky enough to interview Ben a few times, and he’s a terrific guy in addition to being a talented writer. He’s also got a review of the new Stephen King novel, and a bare-knuckled defense of fiction as entertainment, in the November issue of Esquire.