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Margaret Atwood has cancelled her plans to attend the Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature (EAIFL) in Dubai after learning that British author Geraldine Bedell was told by organizers that she could not be a part of the event because one of the characters in her forthcoming novel, The Gulf Between Us, is gay.
Isobel Abulhoul, director of the new Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature (EAIFL), recently informed British novelist Geraldine Bedell that she could not be a part of the event because one of the characters in her forthcoming novel is gay.
After a week of uncertainty, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced today that members of the House and Senate conference committee have negotiated to keep the fifty million dollars that the House of Representatives had designated for the NEA in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The funding, which the House approved on January 28 as part of the stimulus package put forward by president Barack Obama, was cut from the Senate's version of the bill last Friday.
Two months after Markus Dohle announced a dramatic restructuring of Random House imprints, a move that eliminated Stephen Rubin's position as publisher of Doubleday Publishing Group, the Random House chairman yesterday named Rubin publisher at large.
Page Six Magazine, the New York Post's celebrity and gossip supplement, published on Monday a feature in which the editors named the fifty "hottest bachelors" in New York City. Among the rock stars, real estate moguls, and fashionistas on the list are two authors, Salman Rushdie and Keith Gessen.
Publishing giant HarperCollins joined the industry-wide restructuring movement on Tuesday, announcing the closing of an imprint and the dismissal of two of its top executives.
At an elaborate, much-hyped presentation at the Morgan Library in New York City yesterday, Amazon unveiled the Kindle 2, an improved version of its popular e-book reader. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says the upgraded device, which will be available February 24 and will carry a price tag of $359, has more memory, faster page turning, a sharper display, and a longer battery life than its predecessor, which was launched in 2007.
The United States Senate voted on Friday to cut funding for the arts from the economic recovery bill. The amendment to the bill, offered by Republican senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, passed by a wide margin, seventy-three votes to twenty-four. The House of Representatives had approved fifty million dollars in supplemental grants funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) as part of the $819 billion economic stimulus bill put forward by president Barack Obama.
Google announced last week that it has made available to users of advanced mobile phones an additional five hundred thousand titles from its Book Search digital library.
Karin Taylor, who served for over twenty years as executive director of the New York Center for Independent Publishing, was laid off last week, a move prompted by the deteriorating economy.
Cornell University Library announced on Tuesday that it will expand its ongoing partnership with Amazon by releasing tens of thousands of rare and, in many cases, out of print books as print-on-demand titles through the online retailer's Web site.
Among the inevitable roster of athletes and entertainers inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame on Monday, three literary luminaries were recognized by the state for their contributions.
A blogger in Brussels, Belgium, recently launched a collaborative art project that invites readers to create personalized yet anonymous bookmarks and leave them in random books in locations around the world.
Pulitzer Prize–winning author John Updike had a profound impact on the literary community in the United States and abroad, and many authors, editors, publishers, and readers have come forward to reflect on the prolific writer’s life and work following his death from lung cancer last Tuesday.
The House of Representatives approved on Wednesday fifty million dollars in supplemental grants funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) as part of the $819 billion economic stimulus bill put forward by president Barack Obama.
The Washington Post announced yesterday that it will shutter the print version of Book World, the stand-alone book review section of its Sunday edition, and move reviews to two other sections of the paper.
A little more than a month after Rebecca Saletan resigned as senior vice president and publisher of adult trade books at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), the experienced editor has been hired as editorial director of Riverhead Books.
As the nation watches president Barack Obama during his first one hundred days in office, poets from across the country have begun to contribute their responses—in verse—to the new presidency on the blog Starting Today: Poems for the First One Hundred Days.
The magazine that has been diligently reporting the rising number of layoffs in the publishing industry has been hit with a high-profile layoff of its own. Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, the industry's leading trade magazine, was recently laid off as part of a restructuring by the publication's parent company, Reed Business Information.
Harper’s Magazine announced earlier this month that Benjamin Moser will begin writing the magazine’s New Books column in the May issue.
Graywolf Press recently announced that it will release on February 6 a chapbook of Elizabeth Alexander’s poem “Praise Song for the Day,” which the poet read at the inauguration of president Barack Obama.
Andrew Proctor was recently named executive director of Literary Arts, the twenty-five-year-old nonprofit organization in Portland, Oregon. He will succeed Elizabeth Burnett, who resigned from the post in September 2008.
The United States Postal Service released last week a postage stamp commemorating the bicentennial of Edgar Allan Poe's birth.
Faced with budget cuts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation announced on Thursday that it will suspend its biennial poetry festival.
Smashwords, the self-publishing company founded by Mark Coker last year in Los Gatos, California, recently announced an agreement with Lexcycle, the company that makes the popular Stanza e-book reader for iPhone and iPod Touch devices.
