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The historic final home of Edgar Allan Poe, located in the Bronx, New York, will receive its first full renovation beginning next spring, the Associated Press reported. The one-and-a-half story cottage, the last house remaining from the bucolic village of Fordham, will undergo a quarter-million-dollar facelift, including restoration of the shingles, shutters, paint, and plaster. The work is expected to last one year.
After some initial confusion at an award ceremony on Tuesday evening, poet Dannie Abse was named winner of the Wales Book of the Year for his memoir The Presence (Hutchinson, 2007), which he wrote following his wife's death in 2005.
Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood was recently named the winner of Spain’s Prince of Asturias Prize for Letters, which carries a prize of 50,000 euros (approximately $77,750), in recognition of the author's outstanding literary achievement and contribution to the arts.
A first edition of Jane Austen's novel Emma, published in 1816, was recently sold for the record-breaking sum of £180,000 (approximately $354,095) at a London auction.
British novelist Ian McEwan, whose tenth novel On Chesil Beach was published by Anchor Books earlier this month, has drawn sharp criticism from the Muslim Council of Britain for comments he made recently in an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera. The sixty-year-old author said that he "despises Islamism" because of its views on women and homosexuality and that it is "logically asburd and morally unacceptable" that writers who speak out against militant Islam are considered racist.
In the wake of China’s May 12 earthquake, both amateur and professional poets have contributed to a surge of poetry written in response to the disaster, prompting the publication of a number of anthologies, China.org.cn recently ported. The Wenchuan earthquake, named for the location of its epicenter in the nation’s Sichuan Province, killed nearly seventy thousand people and displaced an estimated five million more.
Thousands of library books at the University of Iowa, home to the Writers' Workshop, were in danger of being destroyed last week when the swollen Iowa River crested and flooded Iowa City. Located in the heart of the Iowa River valley, the university has not experienced such an event since since the devastating summer floods of 1993.
Nearly seven hundred years after his death, Dante Alighieri, Italy's most famous poet, finally has a clean criminal record. The city council of Florence voted earlier this week to revoke a death sentence placed on the poet in 1302.
A Vermont inn recently announced that it will host a series of four themed weekends aimed at giving Jane Austen aficionados a taste of the author's nineteenth-century lifestyle.
Denis Johnson, whose epic novel Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) won the 2007 National Book Award in fiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, will begin testing new literary waters this summer with a serial novel, written on deadline for and published in installments in Playboy.
On Wednesday, John Ashbery and Robin Blaser were named the winners of the eighth annual Griffin Poetry Prize, awarded to both a Canadian and an international author or translator for a book of poetry published in English during the previous year.
The home where Mark Twain penned classics such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court may be shutting its doors to the public, as the nonprofit organization that has shaped the property into a cultural center has encountered what may be the final blows in a recent deluge of financial troubles, the New York Times reported yesterday.
The woman Laura Albert enlisted to publicly impersonate JT LeRoy, the fictional author created by Albert whose non-identity was exposed in 2005, will publish her own account of the hoax, the New York Post reported today. Twenty-seven-year-old Savannah Knoop, the half sister of Albert's former partner Geoffrey Knoop, has written Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy, her memoir of socializing with celebrities while posing, complete with sunglasses and blond wig, as the author of Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, works purportedly based on the author's experiences as a twelve-year-old homeless, abused, and drug-addicted son of a prostitute. Seven Stories Press will publish Knoop's book in October.
Book sales rose slightly in 2007 over the previous year, but the upward trend seen over the past few years may not continue, the New York Times reported today.
The London-based literary and cultural magazine Granta announced yesterday that Alex Clark will be its first female editor. Clark, who will continue to serve as the magazine's deputy editor until she assumes her new post in September, succeeds Jason Cowley, who left earlier this month to become editor of the New Statesman, a British news weekly. Cowley was editor of Granta for seven months.
Plans for the Norman Mailer Writers Colony will move one step closer to fruition next Friday in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where a reception will be held in order to begin raising the twelve to fourteen million dollars needed to launch the nonprofit foundation.
