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Graywolf Press has announced plans to move its offices across the Mississippi River from St. Paul to Minneapolis in about two months’ time. The nonprofit publisher will leave the building it has occupied since 1990 to take up new digs in the Traffic Zone Visual Arts Center, located in the city’s trendy Warehouse district.
A judge in London yesterday sentenced three Muslim men to four-and-a-half years in prison for an arson attack against the publisher of a novel about one of Muhammad’s wives. In September 2008, the trio set fire to the home of Martin Rynja just days before his company, Gibson Square, was due to publish The Jewel of Medina by American author Sherry Jones.
For those unaccustomed to absorbing more than 140 characters at a sitting, Penguin is set to release a volume that pares classic books down to a series of tweet-sized chunks. Twitterature, the brainchild of two University of Chicago freshmen, promises to deliver works by Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce, and J. K. Rowling in no more than twenty tweets apiece.
A federal judge in New York City last week issued a preliminary injunction barring the U.S. publication of what attorneys for J. D. Salinger are calling an unauthorized sequel to The Catcher in the Rye.
Editors at the independent poetry press Wave Books recently announced that they will host a three-day poetry event in Seattle at the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery. Slated to run from August 14 to 16, the festival will feature readings, film screenings, exhibitions, discounts on poetry books at fourteen local bookstores, and, according to the organizer’s Web site, wild blackberry picking.
Tennesseans are preparing to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of poet, writer, and critic James Agee. The Knoxville-born author is the subject of an upcoming art exhibition at the Nashville Public Library, and will also be feted with a three-day festival at the Knox County Library.
Author Richard Ford will be the keynote speaker next month when the Sage Hill Writing Experience celebrates its twentieth anniversary in Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley.
The Book Depository, a British online retailer, is gearing up for the launch of its U.S. Web site next month. Designed to make the Gloucester-based bookseller more competitive against North American vendors, the site will feature content and pricing geared toward American customers.
Author Nedim Gürsel, who was charged with insulting Islam after the publication of his 2008 novel The Daughters of Allah, was acquitted yesterday by a court in Istanbul. According to the Turkish news network BIA, the court said that “the novel as a whole does not have any criminal intent and does not represent a crime.”
Poet Matthew Shenoda has been named the first Assistant Provost for Equity and Diversity at California Institute of the Arts. The newly created position is part of an institute-wide initiative to promote intercultural awareness and develop support mechanisms for students from varying ethnic backgrounds.
Yesterday the National Endowment for the Arts announced that it would grant $3,742,765 to 269 organizations nationwide to fund Big Read programming from September 2009 to June 2010.
Perseus Books Group, whose imprints include Basic Books, DaCapo, Running Press, Vanguard Press, Seal Press, and Public Affairs, laid off twenty people late last week. The layoffs affect about 3 percent of the publisher's total work force; most of the positions being cut are from the publishing side of the company and a few are from the distribution side.
Even as the government continues its antitrust investigation of last year’s class-action settlement between Google and the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild, the online search engine is stepping up accessibility to its current collection of digitized books and periodicals.
A federal judge in New York City has issued a ten-day restraining order blocking the U.S. publication of Fredrik Colting’s 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. In her Wednesday ruling, judge Deborah Batts said she needed more time to determine whether the unauthorized sequel to The Catcher in the Rye was allowable under “fair use” provisions.
Yesterday, the Academy of American Poets launched a new online poetry resource targeted at teenage readers and writers of poetry.
Penguin Group recently unveiled a new portion of its Web site called From the Publisher's Office that presents a range of multimedia features promoting the publisher's titles. The new "Web network" contains content that was created, recorded and produced by Penguin editors and staff specifically for the site.
The author sued earlier this month by J. D. Salinger for usurping rights to The Catcher in the Rye has come forward with a defense of what Salinger called a "rip-off, pure and simple" of his classic novel.
Simon & Schuster has become the first major publisher to sell its titles through the online document-sharing service Scribd. Under the terms of a partnership announced on Friday, nearly five thousand e-books from the Simon & Schuster catalogue are being made available for purchase on the site, along with digital previews of thousands more.
David Grant, president and CEO of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, announced this week that he will step down by June 2010. Grant has helmed the New Jersey-based philanthropic organization—best known as the sponsor of the Dodge Poetry Festival—since 1998.
The graduate creative writing program at Boston University (BU) recently received two million dollars from Robert Hildreth, chair of the university’s board of overseers.
Two American journalists who were arrested on March 17, presumably at the border between North Korea and China, have been tried and sentenced to twelve years hard labor, North Korea’s official news agency, KCNA, recently announced. The state agency accused the women, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, of “illegal border crossing” and described their punishment as “reform through labor.”
ScrollMotion, a developer of applications for Apple's iPhone, announced yesterday that it will release a new digital book reader for the device that will offer users a more comprehensive reading experience.
McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers says his quarterly’s next issue intends to prove the viability of print by adopting a newspaper format. Eggers made the announcement at an Authors Guild gathering in New York City last month, where he was being feted for his charity work with the nonprofit 826 National.
Between January and April, Oxford University Press added 1.5 million public “tweets” to its Oxford English Corpus, a vast electronic database that collects examples of words in context. Among the findings: Language use on Twitter tends to focus on the self and the present, while the social networking service’s insistence on brevity gives rise to some creative solutions.
Nobel laureate Toni Morrison was the featured guest at last night’s inauguration of the Free Speech Leadership Council, a new initiative organized by the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC). As part of the event, Morrison spoke with author Fran Lebowitz at the home of council chair and former HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman in New York City.
