Daily News from Poets & Writers

In April, the Harper Perennial imprint of HarperCollins will publish a shorter, happier version of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. The book, which HarperCollins calls the "original version," is an unpublished first draft completed by Tolstoy in 1866.

The Library of Congress recently announced that it will digitize thousands of public domain books in its collection, including many that librarians have deemed "brittle" and in danger of becoming unusable.

On February 1, novelist and political activist Elie Wiesel was attacked and dragged out of an elevator in a San Francisco hotel. Wiesel, the author of the Holocaust memoir Night (Hill and Wang, 1960) and the recipient of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, was a participant in a conference on religion taking place at the hotel. Accord

New York University’s graduate school of arts and science recently named poet Deborah Landau as the director of its creative writing program.

Sam Wyly, a Dallas entrepreneur and philanthropist whose net worth is estimated at $1.1 billion by Forbes magazine, recently agreed to purchase Explore Booksellers, an independent bookstore in Aspen, Colorado, for $5.2 million.

The February issue of Esquire includes nine short stories handwritten on five-inch square cocktail napkins.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.