Forty Percent of iPad Owners Don't Read E-books, Oscar Wilde Uncensored, and More

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:

The reclusive Harper Lee released a statement on Wednesday saying she has nothing to do with the forthcoming book on her life, The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee, in response to a claim by the book's author that it was "written with direct access to Harper Lee." (New York Times) In a related story, Ms. Lee turned eighty-five today. (Jacket Copy)

Over 120 years after it was shorn of all homosexual references by his editor, an uncensored version of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray will be published by Harvard University Press. (Guardian)

Publishers Weekly has a comprehensive preview of next month's BookExpo America, which will take place at the Javits Center in New York City.

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books kicks off this weekend and, inevitably, there's an app for it.

Say what? A new survey found that 40 percent of iPad owners nationwide have never used the device to read even a single e-book. (Marketwire)

A bookstore in New York City's West Village stocks only one book of which it has three thousand copies: Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days With the Phoenix Mars Mission, written by Andrew Kessler, who also happens to be the store's proprietor. (New York Times)

In a heartfelt exchange of letters, Salman Rushdie and Chinese author Liao Yiwu, who is currently banned from traveling to the PEN World Voices Festival, "affirmed the power of literature and solidarity in the face of violations of freedom to write." “Quite simply, we miss you,” Rushdie wrote to Yiwu. “We feel your absence—which, I suppose, is the ultimate testimony to the power of your words.” Read more of the exchange at PEN. 

A heap of celebrity-penned books will hit store shelves in the month of May, including titles from Albert Brooks, Shania Twain, Steven Tyler, and Betty White. (USA Today)