Brave New World Tops Banned Books List, National Library Week, and More

by Staff
4.13.11

Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:

It's National Library Week! (Jacket Copy) And today is National Bookmobile Day.

In a ceremony at the city's New Synagogue, the Berlin Central and Regional Library restored ten books and three journals to the German capitol city's Jewish community as part of a large restitution project to return books looted by the Nazis to their rightful owners. (Winnipeg Free Press)

Nearly eighty years after it first appeared, Aldus Huxley's Brave New World is as controversial as ever, topping an American Library Association list of books Americans attempted to ban the most in 2010. (Guardian)

A new survey finds that only a slim 13 percent of Americans supported the censoring of Mark Twain in NewSouth Book's neutered double edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, while 77 percent opposed the changes. According to the Guardian, "conservatives, moderates and liberals were all equally likely to disagree with the change."

Speaking of Samuel Clemens, despite the passionate efforts of Zadie Smith to save it, the northwest London library founded by Mark Twain in 1900 has been ordered closed by the city council of Brent. "Libraries are beyond price, they are our street corner universities," said another protesting author, Deborah Moggach. (Guardian)

Tom Hanks is set to star in a film adaptation of David Mitchell's 2004 Man Booker Prize–shortlisted novel Cloud Atlas. (Jacket Copy)

One of the hottest properties at this year's London Book Fair, according to Publishers Weekly, is a book by Egyptian Internet Activist Wael Ghonim, whose Facebook page about "Khaled Said, an Egyptian man who was beaten to death by police, went viral and helped spark the revolution that swept Egypt." 

How has publishing changed since 1984? The Atlantic takes the long(er) view.

As Borders bookstores around the country face closure in the wake of the retailer's bankruptcy filing, BuzzFeed has a compilation of the bitter, and sometimes hilarious, gestures made by outgoing Borders employees.