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Poet Anselm Berrigan recently announced that he will be stepping down as artistic director of the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York City. "June 30 of this year will be my last day," Berrigan wrote in a letter to readers of the February/March 2007 issue of the Poetry Project Newsletter.
The February issue of Esquire includes nine short stories handwritten on five-inch square cocktail napkins.
Kevin Brockmeier, the author of the novel The Brief History of the Dead (Knopf, 2006), was recently named the winner of the 2006 Borders Original Voices Award in fiction.
Last Friday, Bertelsmann, the German media conglomerate that owns Random House, announced that Hartmut Ostrowski will be its new chief executive officer starting in 2008. Ostrowski has been a member of Bertelsmann’s executive board for the past six years. He will succeed the current CEO, Gunter Thielen, who will become chairman of the company’s supervisory board.
Touchstone/Fireside, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, recently announced that it will publish the winning manuscript in the Gather.com First Chapters contest. Gather.com, a social networking site with 175,000 registered members, was founded in 2005. The publisher’s announcement comes less than two weeks after the Sobol Award, which offered $100,000 and publication by Touchstone, was cancelled because of an insufficient number of submissions.
Fans of the television show The Office know him as the goofy character Jim Halpert, but actor John Krasinski (who has also appeared in the movies Kinsey, Jarhead, and Dreamgirls) will make his writing and directing debut with the film adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s short story collection, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.
On December 29 Advanced Marketing Services (AMS), the owner of the independent press distributor Publishers Group West (PGW) and the primary supplier of books to the Costco, Sam’s Club, and BJ’s Wholesale Club chains of stores, filed for bankruptcy in a Delaware court.
Perseus Book Group recently announced that it intends to acquire the Avalon Publishing Group, which includes the imprints Carroll & Graf, Seal Press, and Shoemaker and Hoard.
The U.S. Senate recently confirmed Dana Gioia for his second four-year term as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). President Bush reappointed Gioia to the position last September.
A rare book dealer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, recently reported that two handwritten manuscripts of short stories by the late Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges—valued at nearly one million dollars—had been lost, and possibly stolen, only to later find that the manuscripts had simply been misplaced.
The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. is marking its seventy-fifth anniversary in 2007 with Shakespeare in American Life, a yearlong schedule of events honoring the poet and playwright who inspired its founding.
Pirates of the Caribbean star Johnny Depp recently acquired the film rights to three books, including James Meek’s novel The People’s Act of Love (Canongate, 2005), Variety reported last week.
Maureen Egen, the publisher and deputy chairman of Hachette Book Group USA (formerly known as Time Warner Book Group), announced Tuesday that she will step down from "active management" of the company at the end of the year.
Sterling Publishing, a subsidiary of the Barnes & Noble bookstore chain, recently announced the launch of an imprint devoted exclusively to narrative nonfiction.
Christian publisher Thomas Nelson recently announced that it will eliminate all of its twenty-one imprints and publish books solely under the Thomas Nelson name and logo.
Perseus Books Group recently announced that approximately thirty employees of the recently acquired Consortium Books Sales and Distribution will be laid off in March 2007.
Dalkey Archive Press has finally found a new home. Less than a month after the twenty-two-year-old nonprofit publisher abandoned its plans to move from its current location at Ilinois State University to the University of Rochester, Dalkey Archive announced on December 1 that it is moving to the University of Illinois...
On December 12 Independent Lens, a weekly program on PBS, will air a documentary of the late novelist John Fante.
Iain Hollingshead, a twenty-six-year-old British novelist, has won the fourteenth annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award for his novel Twenty Something: The Quarter-Life Crisis of Jack Lancaster (Duckworth, 2006).
The late Norman Mailer was awarded yesterday the fifteenth annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award for a passage in his last novel The Castle in the Forest (Random House, 2007). The award was established in 1993 by the London magazine the Literary Review "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it."
The Library of America, the nonprofit publisher founded in 1979 to "preserve our nation's literary heritage," plans to publish a volume of four novels by cult writer Philip K. Dick next summer.
Rebecca Wolff, the founding editor of the literary magazine Fence and the independent press Fence Books, announced yesterday that Fence Books has entered into an agreement with the National Poetry Series (NPS) as a participating publisher.
At a ceremony in New York City last night, the National Book Foundation announced the winners of the 2006 National Book Awards.
