Today in  publishing and literature: a reappraisal of The Atavist, Amazon has charmed Waterstones, and Texts from Bennet will soon be a book.

David Carr checks in on the progress of The Atavist, the tiny publishing house that's producing very good pieces of long journalism for paying customers. Mainly, it's kind of a mea culpa on Carr's part for calling The Atavist a “tiny curio of a business" now that Google's Eric Schmidt, Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, and the Founder Fund, led by Peter Thiel and Facebook's Sean Parker have all ponied up $1.5 million in seed money for the publisher. According to Carr, they're going to release a free version of their software this summer. While there will probably never be a ten-figure Atavist IPO, it at least shares a similar origin story. The three founders -- New Yorker Web editor Nicholas Thompson, Wired contributor Evan Ratliff, and book Website designer Jefferson Raab -- created something "meets a need that its founders had in their own lives, much the way Facebook did for its founders, and was not conceived in a bald effort to exploit a market." The upside might not be as high as Facebook, but there's a definite niche.   [The New York Times]

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has officially gone ahead and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection today in Manhattan. Earlier in the year, the Boston-based publisher -- which once upon a time was the literary home of J.R.R. Tolkien and Mark Twain -- made major internal changes last year to try and restructure the company, which apparently weren't enough to ward off today's filing.   [Bloomberg BusinessWeek]

This is a significant piece of overseas publishing news: Waterstones -- or Waterstone's, if you're a traditionalist -- is going to stock books from Amazon's publishing arm, unlike Barnes & Noble. Since Waterstone(')s is the United Kingdom's largest brick-and-mortar book retail, this counts as a win for Amazon. [The Guardian]

Today, in book deals based on Tumblr or Twitter accounts: Mac Lethal, the Missouri rapper responsible for Texts from Bennet, has signed a deal with Gallery books for a “modern epistolary novelization" of the screenshot blog. Terms weren't announced. [The New York Observer]

Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at rgustini at theatlantic dot com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.
Ray Gustini