by
Evan Smith Rakoff
12.2.11

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:

Good news for RiverRun Books in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In danger of losing its lease, the community rallied to save the much-loved store. (WCSH)

This Sunday, an upstart literary journal, The New Inquiry, in partnership with New Directions, Google and others, will host a marathon reading of Frederic Tuten’s The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, featuring sixty readers, including A. M. Homes and Oscar Hijuelos, at the Jane hotel in New York City. The New York Times details a weekly meeting of the young writers who edit the new journal, describing it as a "roving clubhouse that functions as an Intellectuals Anonymous of sorts for desperate members of the city’s literary underclass barred from the publishing establishment."

It Books, n+1, and O/R Books, will publish titles relating to the Occupy movement. (New York Observer)

The Millions has launched its annual Year in Reading feature. Throughout December it asks writers to list what they read this past year, especially the book(s) that meant the most.

Emily Rapp, an author at work on a new memoir that chronicles life with her infant son who is dying of Tay-Sachs disease, writes him a love letter. (Nervous Breakdown)

The New York Times reviews the latest film adaptation of Shakespeare's lesser-known tragedy Coriolanus, which is directed by and stars Ralph Fiennes. It opens in theaters today.

The Daily Beast examines the lasting importance of literary critic Lionel Trilling in this review of Adam Kirsch’s recent book of critical essays Why Trilling Matters.

Artist Seth Indigo Carnes is seeking funding via Kickstarter for an iPhone app he's invented for users "to create and share interactive visual poems called 'poetics' that merge text and imagery as one."