by
Evan Smith Rakoff
1.12.12

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:

HarperCollins is launching a program today to sell thousands of backlist titles via print-on-demand technology at independent bookstores across the country. The nine participating stores will simultaneously print a copy of Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett at one o'clock this afternoon. (Shelf Awareness)

Fast Company reports on the discovery of numerous plagiarized e-books in the erotica section of Amazon's Kindle Store.

Critic and novelist Lev Grossman laments the dangers of reading literary biography: "One of the perils…is discovering that the literature you love was written by somebody you don’t especially like." (Time)

Already found a few gray hairs and still shopping that first manuscript? Take heart, the Huffington Post lists seven authors whose careers were late in blooming.

In this video, conservative pundit and author Andrew Sullivan shares his candid thoughts on the nature and direction of the publishing industry with the Daily Beast.

On her website, author Sandra Beasley provides insight into the routine and creative potential of an artist residency. Beasley is now on her third stay at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

The Los Angeles Times looks at the newly-founded Hatchet Job of the Year Award, a prize created by the website Omnivore, and awarded to the year's most acid-tongued British book review.

From the seat of a passenger plane in 1969, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton wrote a heartrending letter to her teenage daughter, Linda, intended to be reread in the future: "This is my message to the 40-year-old Linda." (Letters of Note)