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:
Barnes and Noble has combined its Nook, digital, and college business into a new subsidiary [2], with a three hundred million dollar investment from Microsoft, which gives the software giant a 17 percent ownership in the new company, and allows Microsoft to sell Nook e-books through an application for Windows 8. (Bookseller)
David Carr details how a scuffle between Apple and Amazon [3] caused author Buzz Bissinger's Byliner-produced e-book, After Friday Night Lights, removal from Amazon. (New York Times)
The Los Angeles Times looks at the mission and challenges of the Los Angeles Review of Books [4]—the online publication has garnered much praise, ranging from Ira Silverberg at the National Endowment for the Arts to Slate's Dan Kois, and recently received a twenty-five thousand dollar grant from Amazon.
Nobel prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk has created a museum based on his 2008 novel, The Museum of Innocence [5]. “As far as I know this is the first museum based on a novel,” he said. “But it’s not that I wrote a novel that turned out to be successful and then I thought of a museum. No, I conceived the novel and the museum together.” (New York Times)
Best-selling novelist Stephen King parses the loudest arguments over our nation's tax laws [6]: "Chris Christie may be fat, but he ain’t Santa Claus." (Daily Beast)
Submittable's blog considers Josiah Wedgwood [7], and what can be gleaned from the eighteenth-century pottery innovator about the current state of self-publishing.
New York Times magazine's Joel Lovell explains why you should go buy the Spring 2012 Paris Review [8] (its two hundredth issue), and while you're at it, get the Missouri Review too.
A Kickstarter campaign has launched to fund a documentary featuring conservationist and Pulitzer prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin [9].
Poet Sean Bishop reveals the Herculean tasks literary editors face when selecting work for publication [10], and asks, "Can there be a vocabulary for mystery? How does one defend, with words, what seems un-nameable?" (Ploughshares)