The Three Musketeers Was Ghostwritten, the Year of the Werewolf, 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:

Alexandre Dumas, the nineteenth-century French author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, may have outsourced the actual writing of those books, according to France's leading Dumas expert. (Telegraph)

A Ukrainian writer whose fiction tends to predict real-world political events may have prophesized the next prime minister of Great Britain in a novel published in 2004. (Guardian)

Vampire novels are so 2009. This year? Polish your silver bullets, the werewolves are coming. (Independent)

Google filed an appeal against a court decision ordering the Web giant to stop digitizing French books without publishers' approval. 

The Portland State University Bookstore flooded Sunday night, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage. (OregonLive)

The author of the book Pinch has been accused of book jacket theft. (Telegraph)

Who knew? For those who thought books were books and videos were videos, think again. Videos, it turns out, can sometimes be books. (Washington Post)

Neal Pollack, the comedic memoirist, will give a reading this week to an audience of people doing yoga. (Los Angeles Times)

Many of the books offered as free downloads by the British Library this spring are "cheap, tawdry, lowdown, lowbrow, Victorian trash," according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.