A first edition of Jane Austen's novel Emma, published in 1816, was recently sold for the record-breaking sum of £180,000 (approximately $354,095) at a London auction. 

British novelist Ian McEwan, whose tenth novel On Chesil Beach was published by Anchor Books earlier this month, has drawn sharp criticism from the Muslim Council of Britain for comments he made recently in an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera. The sixty-year-old author said that he "despises Islamism" because of its views on women and homosexuality and that it is "logically asburd and morally unacceptable" that writers who speak out against militant Islam are considered racist.

In the wake of China’s May 12 earthquake, both amateur and professional poets have contributed to a surge of poetry written in response to the disaster, prompting the publication of a number of anthologies, China.org.cn recently ported. The Wenchuan earthquake, named for the location of its epicenter in the nation’s Sichuan Province, killed nearly seventy thousand people and displaced an estimated five million more.

Thousands of library books at the University of Iowa, home to the Writers' Workshop, were in danger of being destroyed last week when the swollen Iowa River crested and flooded Iowa City. Located in the heart of the Iowa River valley, the university has not experienced such an event since since the devastating summer floods of 1993.

Nearly seven hundred years after his death, Dante Alighieri, Italy's most famous poet, finally has a clean criminal record. The city council of Florence voted earlier this week to revoke a death sentence placed on the poet in 1302.