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:
According to the Washington Post, "the Defense Department is attempting to buy the entire first printing—10,000 copies—of a memoir by a controversial former Defense Intelligence Agency officer so that the book can be destroyed."
The world's most expensive book, valued at several million dollars, will go on sale at Sotheby's in London in December. The copy of John James Audobon's Birds of America will be available for purchase alongside a Shakespeare First Folio from 1623. (Star)
According to the New York Observer, the Wall Street Journal will soon launch a weekly book review section, which, of course, "flies in the face of ever-dwindling book coverage in papers across the country."
The Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University is hosting Seventy-Three Poems for Seventy-Three Years: A Celebration of the Life of Lucille Clifton. Amiri Baraka, Elizabeth Alexander, and Nikki Giovanni are among the many poets participating in the event later this month.
National Public Radio takes a minute (seven minutes, actually) to remind everyone about the value of old-school word-of-mouth marketing to sell books.
An editor at the Kartika Review was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma, and her friends and colleagues have organized a literary auction on eBay to raise money for her medical bills (she is without health insurance). The items for sale include signed books and manuscript critiques from established authors. (Jacket Copy)
Thomas Guinzburg, a cofounder of the Paris Review and a longtime president of Viking—he hired Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as an editor there in 1975—died on Wednesday in New York City at the age of eighty-four. (New York Times)
A fourteen-year-old bookworm from the Bronx has been named "New York's reader of the summer" by the New York Public Library after reading 325 books in three months. "My mind is like a sponge," she says. "I take it all in." (Guardian)
