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Two sites of literary history met very different fates last week. In London, the former home of Romantic poet John Keats was reopened to the public after a £500,000 (approximately $820,475) restoration. Meanwhile, in Cleveland, the house where Langston Hughes lived as a teenager was sold in a foreclosure auction for $16,667.
New York University announced this month that it has appointed Orange Prize-winner Zadie Smith as a full professor in its creative writing program. Smith, who currently teaches at Columbia University, will begin her tenure in September 2010.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced yesterday that Bruce Nichols has been appointed senior vice president and publisher of adult trade and reference, filling a position left vacant since Rebecca Saletan resigned last December.
Cambridge University Press (CUP) has kicked off a new print-on-demand project to make rare and out-of-print books available worldwide. The Cambridge Library Collection, which launched on Monday, uses digital scanning technology to reissue works readers would otherwise have to travel to far-flung libraries to consult.
In a statement released yesterday afternoon, Barnes & Noble announced the launch of the Barnes & Noble eBookstore, which it says will stock every available e-book from every publisher, as well as e-book originals. The 700,000 titles currently on offer are compatible with the iPhone, iPod Touch, BlackBerry, and most personal computers, but will notably not work with the Amazon Kindle or the Sony Reader.
Amazon provoked a minor media furor late last week when it tried to quietly remove pirated e-books from hundreds of its Kindle devices. The titles in question: George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. On Thursday, customers who had purchased certain editions of the dystopian classics found that the e-books had vanished and their money had been refunded.
Author Thomas Nesbit announced this week that he will donate half the earnings from his e-book Deep Fried to the nonprofit 826 National, which runs literacy centers for school-aged children in seven American cities. This is the first such pledge to the organization by a debut novelist.
With support for small publishers continuing to dwindle amid the uncertain economic climate, Archipelago Books has put out a call for donations to help it stay afloat. The award-winning New York City-based press, which specializes in literary translations, says shrinking finances have forced it to lay off staff and delay the release of upcoming titles.
The summer issue of the Strand will feature the first chapter in what is to be a five-part serialization of a previously unpublished novel by Graham Greene. The Empty Chair, a murder mystery the author began—and then evidently abandoned—when he was just twenty-two, was discovered last year by a French researcher in the Greene archives at the University of Texas in Austin.
A Cornish beach thought to have been the inspiration behind Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse sold at auction yesterday for £80,000 (about $130,000). The seventy-six acres of Upton Towans beach in Gwithian went to an unnamed buyer from London, who trumped competing bids from as far afield as Russia and the United States.
