Smart Bitches, Trashy Books is holding a Photoshop cover contest in honour of Simon Kernick, the author now known to some unwary shoppers as "Dan Brown". The week's other cover controversy is probably less amenable to image-manipulation competitions, at least within the bounds of taste.

• Crockatt and Powell on how some classics got to be so expensive.

• In praise of AJ Liebling, plus extra bonus praise.

• The possibly providential firing of Jeffrey Eugenides.

• The gawky grammatical clarifications of David Foster Wallace.

• Walter Cronkite interviews Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, while he was still a student journalist.