National Magazine Award Finalists Announced, Advocacy Group Calls for Amazon Boycott, and More

by Staff
3.11.10

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:

The National Magazine Award finalists were announced yesterday, with McSweeney's, the New Yorker, VQR, and the Antioch Review all getting nods in the fiction category.

After Amazon "terminated its Associates program in Colorado" because of a recent change in the state's tax laws, an advocacy group with two hundred thousand members has called for a boycott of the online retailer. (Publishers Weekly)

Google signed an agreement with the Italian government to scan up to a million books from national libraries in Rome and Florence. (Bookseller)

An international best-selling writer is starting a volunteer-run nonprofit monthly newspaper in his small Massachusetts town "because a few people have come to realise that if we do not do something, small villages like ours are going to slip through the meshes of the Internet and become forgotten." (Publishing Perspectives)

The New Yorker takes a closer look at what exactly is in the David Foster Wallace archive aquired earlier this week by the Harry Ransom Center.

The winners of this year's Best Translated Book Awards were announced last night. The Russian Version won for poetry and The Confessions of Noa Webber snagged the fiction prize. (Three Percent

A Guardian critic suggests that poetry may be the remedy for what ails Britain's Labour Party. 

A collective of independent bookstores in Paris launched an online portal for selling new books. (Bookseller)

A Booker Prize-winning title has an iPhone app all to itself, including features such as a family tree, an essay by the book's author, video discussions, and a news feed. (Independent

The Hatchette Book Group had an exceptional sales year in 2009, selling more e-books in the month of December than in the whole of 2008. (Publishers Weekly