Frank Rich Revisits Nora Ephron, First-Time Authors Over Forty, and More

by
Evan Smith Rakoff
8.21.12

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:

Mark Brixey, the director of Missouri State University's bookstore, has been fired after over eighty thousand dollars was discovered in his desk during an internal audit. A financial investigation revealed four hundred thousand dollars unaccounted for over the past three years. The university had employed Brixey for twenty-one years.  (KY3)

Bookstore sales were up almost 4 percent in June. (Shelf Awareness)

Meanwhile, GalleyCat reports Barnes & Noble surpassed its market expectations, with a revenue increase in the first quarter compared to last year, although the company is still operating at a net loss.

Frank Rich revisits the life and work of his friend Nora Ephron. (New York)

In light of E. L. James publishing her first book, Fifty Shades of Grey, at age forty-eight, Beyond the Margins rounds up many other famous authors whose first work appeared after age forty.

From Plato to Joan Didion, Lapham's Quarterly examines belief in sympathetic magic and other superstitions.

M. J. Rose discusses the pressure on authors to engage with social media, such as Twitter and Facebook. (Writer Unboxed)

Newsweek published an excerpt from D. T. Max's new biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story.

Joanna Neborsky has illustrated a partial inventory of Gustave Flaubert’s personal effects, which were listed twelve days after the author's death in 1880. (Explore)