Oscar Snubs Author Despite Six Nominations, Google Ruling Delayed Indefinitely, 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:

Judge Denny Chin, perhaps best known for sentencing Bernie Madoff to prison, delayed his ruling on the Google Books Settlement indefinitely yesterday. (Telegraph)

The author of the novel Up in the Air, which was adapted into a film that received six Oscar nominations this year, did not receive an invitation to the ceremony. (Los Angeles Times) UPDATE: He's been invited! (New York Observer)

Simon & Schuster's operating incoming fell by 46 percent in 2009. (Bookseller)

Faber & Faber is republishing a novel that was smuggled out of Nazi German in 1934 by its author, who baked the manuscript into two cakes and smuggled it past S. S. guards. (Guardian) 

Ingram Content Group announced an agreement with the Department of Defense to offer downloadable digital audiobooks to troops overseas and their dependents back home through MyiLibrary. 

Elizabeth Alexander pays tribute to Lucille Clifton. (New Yorker)

This year's Read an E-Book Week kicks off next month with free e-book downloads and e-reading demonstrations.

As it turns out, the outlandish eighteenth-century personal account that inspired Robert Louis Stevens's Kidnapped and four other novels is actually true. (Guardian)