Chinese Company Announces Color E Ink Device, Iraqi Books Return to Market, and More

by Staff
11.8.10

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:

A new study by Reader's Digest found that one in twenty kids has never read a book, and one in five kids surveyed "hardly ever" reads a book. "What's striking is that children say the most significant influence on their behaviour is what their peer group are doing—something that barely registers in the parents' list of factors," said the magazine's editor in chief. (Telegraph

Mark Gerson, who for forty years photographed some of the biggest names in English Literature—from T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden to James Baldwin and Salman Rushdie—will soon sell signed pictures of various literary giants at Bonhams auction house in England. (Independent)

Meet today's new genre, Hint Fiction, starring Joyce Carol Oates. (Jacket Copy)

Michel Houellebecq has won France's top literary award, the Goncourt Prize. (BBC News)

Tomorrow a Chinese company will launch the first color E Ink e-reader at a trade show in Tokyo. (New York Times)

A catalogue of Iraqi books will be available on the international market for the first time since the war began, thanks to Baghdad's al-Muthanna Library. (Publishing Perspectives) Download the catalogue to see all six hundred titles here.

According to the Millions, something like forty-five thousand young people are participating in this year's National Novel Writing Month.

Booker winner Ian McEwan's son, a postgraduate researcher at Cambridge, may have discovered a cure for the common cold. (Telegraph)