A Vermont inn recently announced that it will host a series of four themed weekends aimed at giving Jane Austen aficionados a taste of the author's nineteenth-century lifestyle.

Denis Johnson, whose epic novel Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) won the 2007 National Book Award in fiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, will begin testing new literary waters this summer with a serial novel, written on deadline for and published in installments in Playboy.

On Wednesday, John Ashbery and Robin Blaser were named the winners of the eighth annual Griffin Poetry Prize, awarded to both a Canadian and an international author or translator for a book of poetry published in English during the previous year. 

The home where Mark Twain penned classics such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court may be shutting its doors to the public, as the nonprofit organization that has shaped the property into a cultural center has encountered what may be the final blows in a recent deluge of financial troubles, the New York Times reported yesterday.