Scarlett Johansson Helms Capote Adaptation, Layoffs at Village Voice and Pearson, 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:

Gawker reports mass layoffs at the storied Village Voice.

Meanwhile, Pearson, which owns Penguin, has terminated nineteen employees. (GalleyCat)

Several major media players, including William Morris Endeavor, BookExpo, and the Perseus Books Group, are sponsoring a Publishing Hackathon in New York City this weekend—crowdsourcing “new approaches to digital book discovery.” (Digital Book World)

Governor Rick Scott declined Amazon's offer to begin collecting sales tax in Florida, in exchange for deals regarding several proposed Florida warehouses. (Shelf Awareness)

In response to a recent dustup between Claire Messud and Publishers Weekly, the New Yorker surveyed novelists Margaret Atwood, Donald Antrim, Rivka Galchen, Jonathan Franzen, and Tessa Hadley, and asked them “how often the question of likeability has been posed about their characters.”

Actor Jeremy Irons recently revealed his love for T. S. Eliot to the Telegraph. In a few weeks, Irons will read Eliot's Four Quartets at the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts in the United Kingdom.

Another Hollywood star, Scarlett Johansson, will direct a screen adaptation of Truman Capote's Summer Crossing. It will mark Johansson's first time behind the camera. (Guardian)

Medium suggests that if you want to be a creative person, learn to say NO.

If you're in New York City this weekend, Brooklyn is hosting its famous Lit Crawl. (Awl)