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Barnes & Noble is sued by one of its investors; a film adaptation of Kerouac's On the Road is set to film this summer; two literary festivals close in Jerusalem; Open Road starts a Twitter account for William Styron; and other news.
A rock band of academics releases a literature-themed album; Macmillan admits to bribing a Sudanese official over a publishing contract; a San Francisco nonprofit launches an initiative to serve visually impaired readers; and other news.
The National Book Foundation (NBF) announced today that among the winners of its Innovations in Reading Prizes is Cellpoems, a poetry journal distributed via text message. The journal, which accepts submissions online and, naturally, via text message, will receive a twenty-five-hundred-dollar grant to continue, in the words of NBF's director of programs Leslie Shipman, "using technology in a surprising and innovative way to make poetry a part of people’s daily lives."
Details on how to submit and how to receive the journal—which readers can also follow on Twitter—are available on the Cellpoems Web site.
Other 2010 Innovations in Reading winners are 826 Valencia, the San Francisco branch of 826 National's network of nonprofit literary centers; Free Minds Book Club and Writing Workshop for teenage boys incarcerated in Washington, D.C.; Mount Olive Baptist Church in rural South Carolina, which established a community children's library; and United Through Reading, a program assists parents who are separated from their children in creating DVD recordings of storybook readings.
HarperCollins reports a boost in profits; the Los Angeles Public Library faces major budget cuts; Google announces plans to sell digital books; a candidate for U.K. prime minister attempts to trade on his love of Samuel Beckett; and other news.
Mediabistro's book blog, GalleyCat, has commenced its World's Longest Literary Remix contest, which invites a preregistered group of writers to recompose one page each of a work by nineteenth-century novelist Horatio Alger, famous for his copious rags-to-riches narratives. For interested parties who aren't on the roster to submit rewrites of Alger's "badly-written, meandering, and oversimplified public domain parable" Joe's Luck, or Always Wide Awake, GalleyCat is still taking names for a waiting list via e-mail.
The rewritten pages, from which three winning entries will be randomly selected, are due on June 7. Prizes include printed copies of the remixed novel, courtesy of Scribd and Blurb; a selection of books from Quirk Books, publishers of twisted literary titles such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Android Karenina; and the first four issues of Electric Literature, a quarterly online and POD journal. The digital book version of the Joe's Luck remix will be available to the public for free.
GalleyCat has plans to run similar contests in the future with other public domain books—and the waitlisted writers from this first contest will be among the first to be invited in the next round. More information is posted on GalleyCat.
Apple reports selling a milllion iPads; Kent State offers Peace Stanzas on the fortieth anniversary of its campus shootings; Nikki Giovanni pledges her copyrights to Virginia Tech; a Portland, Oregon, bookstore and all its contents are destroyed by a fire; and other news.
Applications for the Oxford Professor of Poetry post close this week; a new Allen Ginsberg photography exhibit opens at the National Gallery of Art; an alleged Catcher in the Rye sequel gets another day in court; and other news.
Back then, I didn't have time for Poets & Writers. Fine, I was part of a panel discussion it sponsored, went to get-togethers: awfully smart people, high-minded yet down to earth. But I was serving on the boards of PEN and Mystery Writers of America. Enough. I'd learned that while being a "living American novelist" was exhilirating, being out there depleted my energy for fantasy and work, the two activities that made me a writer in the first place. So sorry, P&W.
In the third installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, contributor Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Chicago to talk with Linda Bubon and Ann Christophersen, co-owners of Women & Children First.
