Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:

Open Letter Books [2] has been awarded a $20,000 grant by Amazon to support the publication of The Wall in My Head, an Iron Curtain-themed anthology conceived by the editors of the international literary magazine Words Without Borders [3].

Brooklyn-based independent publisher Akashic Books [4] has unveiled a new blog.

More than 150,000 aspiring authors are expected to participate this year in National Novel Writing Month [5], which has so far inspired nearly half-a-billion words of new fiction.

Kyle Pope, formerly of the now-defunct business magazine Condé Nast Portfolio, will take over from Tom McGeveran as editor of the New York Observer next month (Observer [6]).

Literary quarterly McSweeney’s has released a nine-page preview of its much-anticipated newspaper issue, the San Francisco Panorama [7], which will be distributed early next month.

British printers are warning that rising paper costs will be passed on to publishers and, presumably, readers (Booksellers [8]).

Village Books [9] in Fairhaven, Washington, has become the first retailer on the West Coast to offer titles printed on-site by an Espresso Book Machine (Western Front [10]). Meanwhile, the University of Missouri is the latest educational institution to employ the print-on-demand device in its campus bookstore (Columbia Daily Tribune [11]).

Children’s author and accused war criminal Radovan Karadzic will no longer be permitted to represent himself in court, judges in The Hague decided yesterday (New York Times [12]).

Trade magazine Book Business [13] has released its 2009 ranking of the country’s "Best Book Publishing Companies to Work For."