Jump to navigation Skip to content
McSweeney's, the Georgia Review, and the Paris Review won National Magazine Awards on Tuesday night.
The British literary magazine Granta, which last month published its second issue devoted to the "Best Young American Novelists," recently named Jason Cowley as its new editor. Cowley, who was the literary editor of the New Statesman for five years, will succeed Ian Jack in September.
Today marks the official start of the third annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature in New York City. The six-day schedule of events includes readings, lectures, and panel discussions featuring 162 writers from forty-five different countries representing twenty-one different languages.
The opening of Dickens World, a $115 million theme park in Chatham, England, was recently delayed six weeks due to a problem with some of the materials used in its interactive shows.
Natasha Trethewey won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin). Also nominated were Martín Espada for The Republic of Poetry (Norton) and David Wojahn for Interrogation Palace: New & Selected Poems 1982-2004 (University of Pittsburgh Press).
A controversial painting of a young woman in a white dress holding a green parasol will be sold at auction next Thursday at Christie's in New York City. Some say it's the only oil painting of the 19th-century British author Jane Austen in existence.
David Lassman, the director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, England, recently staged a familiar experiment intended to determine what sort of response the nineteenth-century author would receive in the current literary marketplace.
Bertelsmann AG, the German media conglomerate that owns Random House, Inc., announced today that it has bought out Time, Inc.'s interest in Bookspan, their book-club joint venture that includes Book-of-the-Month Club.
Eight authors, including two Americans, were shortlisted last week for the annual International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, a prize established twelve years ago to highlight the literary prominence of the Irish capital.
Ian McEwan, whose eleventh novel, On Chesil Beach, is forthcoming in June, recently agreed to return a handful of pebbles that he had unwittingly stolen from a protected beach in southwest England. McEwan admitted to taking the pebbles from Chesil Beach during a promotional interview for his new book. The beach, which is part of the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site, is protected; removing pebbles is illegal and can result in a fine.
Titanic costars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet will appear together again in a film adaption of Richard Yates's novel Revolutionary Road (Little, Brown, 1961). The movie, which is scheduled to begin filming this summer, will be directed by Sam Mendes, who won an Academy Award for his directorial debut, American Beauty (1999).
The Los Angeles Times announced yesterday that on April 15 it will no longer publish its Book Review as a stand-alone section; instead it will be combined with the opinion section (currently titled “Current”).
The Warner Books imprint of Hachette Book Group USA announced today that it will change its name to Grand Central Publishing. The imprint was formerly part of Time Warner Book Group, which was acquired last February for $537.5 million by the Hachette Livre division of the French conglomerate Lagardère.
John Calder, the namesake and owner of the British publisher Calder Publications, recently announced that he plans to retire and sell the rights to publish the company’s books, which include the British copyrights to many of Samuel Beckett’s novels.
The used book Web site AbeBooks recently launched a book recommendation system that draws titles from personal collections compiled on LibraryThing, a book cataloging Web site created by Tim Spalding in 2005. Whenever an AbeBooks user searches for one of the ten million books listed in the databases of both AbeBooks and LibraryThing, the new BookHints system will generate a list of three to six other books that the user might enjoy.
On March 13, a group of three poets won the $100,000 Microsoft "Ultimate Challenge" small business competition for their proposal of establishing a poetry café. The Mayhem Poets—Mason Granger, Kyle Sutton, and Scott Tarazevits, three friends who met at Rutgers University in New Jersey—entered the contest with an idea for a full-service restaurant that holds daily poetry workshops and nightly poetry performances.
On March 9, Linda Myers, the executive director of the Minneapolis-based nonprofit Loft Literary Center, announced that she will retire in October.
On March 15, the United States Postal Service will celebrate the two hundredth birthday of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by issuing a thirty-nine cent Longfellow stamp.
In an earnings report released yesterday, Barnes & Noble announced that it will close its Memphis, Tennessee, Internet distribution center and lay off more than two hundred employees.
