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Over the holidays, Barnes & Noble experienced a decline in retail revenues compared to last year; David L. Ulin looks at the prison diaries of the late Greek poet Yannis Ritsos; Michael Johnson reveals his obsession with Alexander Pushkin, and other news.
Simon & Schuster reports its sales were down last quarter, yet earnings rose; Vanity Fair visits with novelist and Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes; crime writer Nancy Mancuso Gelber was recently imprisoned for contracting to murder her husband; and other news.
Two of the world's largest publishers, Random House and Penguin, are discussing a merger; novelist Rick Moody was the victim of a ring of hackers and identity thieves; Donald Hall provides thoughts on the ubiquitous public poetry reading, and rich details from his career as an acclaimed poet; and other news.
Haiti Noir, a collection of stories edited by Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat, is one of the latest in Akashic Books’ series of noir fiction anthologies from around the world.
In October MTV’s college network, mtvU, surprised some of its more literary-minded viewers when it named Iranian poet Simin Behbahani as its next poet laureate. She is only the second poet, following John Ashbery, to hold the honorary post.
A panel of international writers has chosen Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude as the book that has most influenced world literature over the past twenty-five years. The survey, commissioned by international literary magazine Wasafiri, coincided with the release last Friday of the quarterly’s twenty-fifth anniversary issue.
Author Nedim Gürsel, who was charged with insulting Islam after the publication of his 2008 novel The Daughters of Allah, was acquitted yesterday by a court in Istanbul. According to the Turkish news network BIA, the court said that “the novel as a whole does not have any criminal intent and does not represent a crime.”
Four days after a liberal blogger and writer was stabbed at a bookstore during a reading in Beijing, the writing community here still has more questions than answers. Xu Lai is recovering, his compatriots are actively theorizing about the motives behind the incident in their blogs, and the proprietors of the bookstore-café that sponsored the event are uneasy and hoping to avoid notoriety.
The Burmese poet Saw Wai was sentenced on Monday to two years in prison for writing a love poem that contains a hidden criticism of the Burmese dictator General Than Shwe.
In the cyclone-ravaged country of Myanmar, where citizens face censorship and repression, contributor Stephen Morison Jr. speaks with authors who, despite the country's Orwellian police state, refuse to be intimidated and continue to write.
