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Amazon is taking steps to ban spam and non-exclusive content from its Kindle Store; tonight the New Yorker will publish a new story by Jennifer Egan via Twitter; the Guardian looks at T. S. Eliot's influence on contemporary songwriters, such as Arcade Fire, P. J. Harvey, and Radiohead; and other news.
Publishing-industry veteran Mike Shatzkin shares the letter he penned to the Department of Justice regarding its antitrust lawsuit; Dwight Garner examines the life and work of poet Richard Brautigan; author Amy Shearn recently discovered her grandmother kept a correspondence with Hemingway's second wife, the journalist Martha Gellhorn; and other news.
Tom Vanderbilt considers the vagaries of literary fame; film director Peter Weir will adapt Jennifer Egan's 2006 novel, The Keep; Gary Glazner has developed a program that uses poetry to benefit dementia patients; and other news.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has filed for bankruptcy protection to restructure its debt; Word and Film wonders what's driving Hollywood's current fascination with literary novels; a one-page note written by Edgar Allan Poe to Sarah Josepha Hale was recently auctioned; and other news.
Longreads has compiled articles about Facebook, Weldon Owen Publishing offers an infographic of the birth of a book, and parodist Mark Crick imagines how Dostoevsky would tile his bathroom.
In light of 2012 marking the two hundredth anniversary of the births of Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and Edward Lear, the Guardian examines the literary afterlife; Studs Terkel would have turned one hundred yesterday, and the city of Chicago is celebrating the occasion; the New Yorker considers Get Your War On author David Rees’s business of artisanal pencil sharpening; and other news.
Famed novelist Carlos Fuentes passed away Tuesday in Mexico City. He was eighty-three; the Guardian looks at the legacy of the great John Updike; a former pharmaceutical executive, Andrew G. Bodnar, convicted of a white-collar crime, was sentenced to write a book; and other news.
If you were unable to attend Barney Rosset's memorial at Cooper Union's Great Hall in New York City last week, Evergreen Review has posted remembrances; the New Yorker has introduced Page-Turner, a new daily books blog; Alice Bolin visits the Montana grave of poet Richard Hugo; and other news.
In Moscow, thousands took to the streets to walk with a group of writers who organized a protest against government efforts to discourage public gatherings; Steve Almond looks at the Washington Post's Mitt Romney bullying story through the eyes of his adolescent self; Lisa Cholodenko is slated to direct adaptations of Tom Perrota's The Abstinence Teacher and Cheryl Strayed's Wild; and other news.
Radio Free Europe explains how an obscure nineteenth-century Kazakh poet, Abai, has become an unlikely symbol of the protests opposing Putin's return to power in Russia; Forbes features Jeff Mayersohn, the person who saved Harvard Bookstore from oblivion; the Guardian reports that the mysterious lover Federico García Lorca directed his sonnets has been revealed; and other news.
Poet Joshua Clover and eleven students may face jail for taking part in a bank protest at UC Davis; Stephan Lee pitches a writing competition as a new reality show; Open Culture gathered over four hundred free audio books, including works by Conrad, Poe, and Wharton; and other news.
The American Booksellers Association requests ABA members make their thoughts known on the agency model to the Department of Justice; twenty-four people recently undertook a full-scale re-enactment of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; author Emily St. John Mandel considers genre fiction and the marketing labels placed on books; and other news.
In the ongoing court battle over book scans, Google seeks to dismiss the Authors Guild class-action suit; Time magazine visits author John Irving at his New Hampshire home; the professional life of Jane Austen; and other news.
The Guardian takes a look at the Tehran International Book Fair; a beta version of LitFactor, a website meant to connect writers and agents is launched; and Flavorwire features the ten best memoirs about mothers.
Retail giant Target will stop carrying the Amazon Kindle; HBO has canceled plans to produce a series based on Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections; poet Jennifer Knox lists the music she'd take with her to a desert island; and more.
Eliza Griswold investigates why women in Afghanistan risk their lives in pursuit of poetry; what Herman Melville's famous Bartleby can teach us about Occupy Wall Street; critic Marjorie Perloff looks at the state of contemporary poetry; and other news.
Barnes and Noble has combined its Nook, digital, and college business into a new subsidiary, with a three hundred million dollar investment from Microsoft; David Carr details how a scuffle between Apple and Amazon caused author Buzz Bissinger's e-book removal from Amazon; a Kickstarter campaign has launched to fund a documentary featuring Pulitzer prize-winning poet W. S. Merwin; and other news
Amazon's quarterly revenues were up 34 percent, but net income is down; with the sequel to Hilary Mantel's best-selling Wolf Hall coming out early next month, the Wall Street Journal examines the popularity of book series; Downton Abbey's Jessica Brown Findlay will appear alongside Colin Farrell in an adaptation of Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale; and other news.
Guests arriving at the two Standard hotels in New York City for the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature next week will receive a gift bag filled with books selected by Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Jennifer Egan; the Atlantic looks at the tortured history of book reviews; How to Cook Everything author Mark Bittman writes of a pilgrimage to visit his friend, Kentucky author Wendell Berry; and other news.
Doris Betts, an award-winning Southern author, died on Saturday at her home in North Carolina; Tor/Forge eliminates DRM; a translation of the only known interview with Peruvian poet César Vallejo; and other news.
An anonymous publishing executive explains why he enjoys breaking Digital Rights Management on e-books; Mike Shatzkin reveals the things he learned from the recent London Book Fair; Reuters looks at the long history of literary tourism; and other news.
WNYC's On the Media's takes a comprehensive look at the state of the publishing industry; the Wall Street Journal examines the criticism of the Department of Justice's antitrust suit; today marks the 448th anniversary of the birth of Shakespeare; and other news.
In response to Katie Roiphe’s Newsweek story on the popularity of the erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey, Salon asks dominatrixes about the phenomenon; appropriation artist Richard Prince’s latest work is the Catcher in the Rye by Richard Prince; Jamie Quatro examines how yoga's half-moon pose relates to the split consciousness of a typical writer; and other news.
Melville House shares a possible defense against the Department of Justice's antitrust suit; Lena Dunham, the twenty-something creator of HBO’s Girls, reveals her reading habits; a London publisher has forged a collaboration between Tolkien and Dickens; and other news.
Bookstore sales dropped over 4 percent in February; backlash to the Pulitzer Board's decision not to award a fiction prize; Sarah Weinman reveals the secret formula for a mega-bestselling novel; and other news.
