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:

Appearing on The View, a daytime talk show, one guest claimed to have never heard of the best-selling erotica novel, 50 Shades of Grey—president Barack Obama [2]. (GalleyCat)

In light of 2012 marking the two hundredth anniversary of the births of Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and Edward Lear, the Guardian examines the literary afterlife [3].

The New Yorker debates the many English translations of the first sentence [4] of Albert Camus’s The Stranger.

The writer Studs Terkel would have turned one hundred [5] yesterday, and the city of Chicago is celebrating the occasion. (Huffington Post)

To mark the sixtieth anniversary of diplomatic relations between Pakistan and Japan [6], the Rawalpindi Arts Council in Islamabad held a recital of haiku poetry. (Pakistan Observer)

The New Yorker considers Get Your War On author David Rees’s new book, How to Sharpen Pencils, and his business of artisanal pencil sharpening [7]: "Clients send him fifteen dollars and a blunt pencil, which he then sharpens by hand before sending it back to them complete with bagged shavings and a signed certificate of sharpening."

If you're near New York City, Lit Crawl Brooklyn 2012 [8] is this weekend, featuring numerous events, including a PEN reading at BookCourt bookstore with Catherine Barnett, Monica Ferrell, and Cathy Park Hong [9].