Microsoft Partners with Barnes and Noble, Orhan Pamuk's Novel Museum, 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:

Barnes and Noble has combined its Nook, digital, and college business into a new subsidiary, with a three hundred million dollar investment from Microsoft, which gives the software giant a 17 percent ownership in the new company, and allows Microsoft to sell Nook e-books through an application for Windows 8. (Bookseller)

David Carr details how a scuffle between Apple and Amazon caused author Buzz Bissinger's Byliner-produced e-book, After Friday Night Lights, removal from Amazon. (New York Times)

The Los Angeles Times looks at the mission and challenges of the Los Angeles Review of Books—the online publication has garnered much praise, ranging from Ira Silverberg at the National Endowment for the Arts to Slate's Dan Kois, and recently received a twenty-five thousand dollar grant from Amazon.

Nobel prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk has created a museum based on his 2008 novel, The Museum of Innocence. “As far as I know this is the first museum based on a novel,” he said. “But it’s not that I wrote a novel that turned out to be successful and then I thought of a museum. No, I conceived the novel and the museum together.” (New York Times)

Best-selling novelist Stephen King parses the loudest arguments over our nation's tax laws: "Chris Christie may be fat, but he ain’t Santa Claus." (Daily Beast)

Submittable's blog considers Josiah Wedgwood, and what can be gleaned from the eighteenth-century pottery innovator about the current state of self-publishing.

New York Times magazine's Joel Lovell explains why you should go buy the Spring 2012 Paris Review (its two hundredth issue), and while you're at it, get the Missouri Review too.

A Kickstarter campaign has launched to fund a documentary featuring conservationist and Pulitzer prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin.

Poet Sean Bishop reveals the Herculean tasks literary editors face when selecting work for publication, and asks, "Can there be a vocabulary for mystery? How does one defend, with words, what seems un-nameable?" (Ploughshares)