Kirkus Reviews Sold, Scribd Goes Mobile, 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 owner of the Indiana Pacers and chairman emeritus of Simon Property Group, a shopping mall developer, has bought Kirkus Reviews from the Nielsen Company. (New York Times)

PEN American Center president Kwame Anthony Appiah has issued a statement following reports that a Beijing court rejected writer Liu Xiaobo's appeal of his “subversion” conviction and eleven-year prison sentence.

The New York Times reports on the discovery of a plantation owner's diary that fed the fiction of William Faulkner; scholars are calling it "a once-in-a-lifetime literary find.”

Now that Dante's Inferno is a video game, Wired imagines ten more classic books "that would make totally kick-ass games."

The social publishing Web site Scribd plans a mobile application that will allow users to get millions of the documents stored on the site to an assortment of reading devices. (Wall Street Journal)

A British columnist suggests that an era in American literature is coming to a close. (Guardian)