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:
Starting today, the Atlantic will release two short stories every month (inaugural offerings are by Christopher Buckley and Edna O’Brien) for sale exclusively through Amazon’s Kindle store (New York Times [2]).
Lambda Rising [3]—the oldest LGBT bookstore in Washington, D.C., and the progenitor of the nonprofit Lambda Literary Foundation—will close its two remaining locations by January.
A handwritten poem by Edgar Allan Poe, the manual typewriter used since 1963 by Cormac McCarty, and a letter written by George Washington—which fetched over three million dollars—were among the record-setting literary sales chalked up by Christie’s last week (Associated Press [4]). The auction house had harder luck with the manuscript of Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura, which was withdrawn from sale after bidding failed to approach the half-million-dollar expectation (Straits Times [5]).
An Amazon spokesperson has denied rumors—reported yesterday by the Times [6]of London—that the retailer is conducting a “secret search” for bricks-and-mortar locations (Press Association [7]).
Online literary community Protagonize [8]—which lets authors network and share writing—has passed the ten-thousand-member milestone.
The Ahmed Baba Institute—a library dedicated to preserving the often-neglected literary heritage of sub-Saharan Africa—has moved into a new, state-of-the-art facility in Timbuktu, Mali (BBC [9]).
Plans for a joint digital venture are expected to be announced this week by News Corp., Time Inc., Conde Nast, Hearst, and Meredith (Financial Times [10]).
It isn’t listed in the OED, but “Twitter” has beaten out “Obama,” “stimulus,” and “vampire” as the most popular word of 2009, according to the Austin-based Global Language Monitor [11] (Guardian [12]).