The London-based literary and cultural magazine Granta announced yesterday that Alex Clark will be its first female editor. Clark, who will continue to serve as the magazine's deputy editor until she assumes her new post in September, succeeds Jason Cowley, who left earlier this month to become editor of the New Statesman, a British news weekly. Cowley was editor of Granta for seven months.

Plans for the Norman Mailer Writers Colony will move one step closer to fruition next Friday in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where a reception will be held in order to begin raising the twelve to fourteen million dollars needed to launch the nonprofit foundation.

Poets House, the nonprofit poetry library and literary center in New York City, announced recently that it will honor Cave Canem founders Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady with the Elizabeth Kray Award, given biennially to individuals who serve poetry in the spirit of Kray, who founded Poets House, along with Stanley Kunitz, in 1985. The award will be presented to Derricotte and Eady following the thirteenth annual Poetry Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge, a benefit event for Poets House, on June 9.

James Frey has had quite a week. His novel, Bright Shiny Day, published last Tuesday by HarperCollins, has sold 14,343 copies, according Nielson BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of a book's total sales.

Nineteenth-century poet William McGonagall, once dismissed as the world's worst, received posthumous compensation as a collection of thirty-five poems went for £6,600 (approximately thirteen thousand dollars) at auction last Friday in the poet's native Edinburgh, Scotland, BBC News reported.

The Man Booker Prize, the prestigious annual award given for a novel by a writer from the British Commonwealth or Ireland, will celebrate its fortieth anniversary by honoring one of its previous winners with the Best of the Booker Prize, judged ultimately by the reading public. Anyone may cast a vote for one of the six Best of the Booker finalists, selected from forty-one winning novels dating back to 1969 by judges Victoria Glendinning, Mariella Frostrup, and John Mullan.

Tommy Lee Jones is planning to adapt, produce, direct, and star in a film version of Ernest Hemingway's posthumous novel Island in the Stream (Scribner, 1970), Reuters reports. Morgan Freeman and John Goodman are reportedly in discussions to be involved in the project.