"Worst Book Reviewer in America," Mike Daisey Inside the Apple Factory, 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:

Amazon has reached an agreement to collect sales tax in Indiana. (Shelf Awareness)

With the retirement of Clark Kepler, owner of Kepler's bookstore in Menlo Park, California, the fifty-six-year-old store faces an uncertain future. (Almanac)

Critic Dwight Garner reviews spoken-word artist and musician Gil Scott-Heron's posthumously published memoir, The Last Holiday. (New York Times)

For NPR's You Must Read This, poet Roya Hakakian speaks of the immigrant experience in America, turning to her former nation's poetry for comfort and identity, and an unhinging encounter with Theodore Roethke's famous poem, "My Papa's Waltz."

Written in 1895, Mark Twain's "Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences" lists eighteen rules of fiction shattered by James Fenimore Cooper’s popular novel of 1841, The Deerslayer. (Brain Pickings)

After novelist Raymond Chandler was fired by Alfred Hitchcock over an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train, Chandler expressed his frustration with the legendary film director via letter: "But if you wanted something written in skim milk, why on earth did you bother to come to me in the first place?" (Letters of Note)

Flavorwire lists ten "Legendary Bad Boys of Literature," including Michel Houellebecq, Hanif Kureishi, and Lord Byron.

Meanwhile, in our historical moment, Alexander Nazaryan is not mincing words at Page Views, the book blog of the New York Daily News. Nazaryan lists the reasons he believes fellow critic and author Adam Langer is the "worst book reviewer in America."

Memoirist and monologist Mike Daisey investigates the production of the technology we use each day, specifically devices made by Apple—the computer of choice for many in the creative arts. (This American Life)