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:

Mark Brixey, the director of Missouri State University's bookstore, has been fired after over eighty thousand dollars was discovered in his desk [2] during an internal audit. A financial investigation revealed four hundred thousand dollars unaccounted for over the past three years. The university had employed Brixey for twenty-one years.  (KY3)

Bookstore sales were up almost 4 percent [3] in June. (Shelf Awareness)

Meanwhile, GalleyCat reports Barnes & Noble surpassed its market expectations [4], with a revenue increase in the first quarter compared to last year, although the company is still operating at a net loss.

Frank Rich revisits the life and work of his friend Nora Ephron [5]. (New York)

In light of E. L. James publishing her first book, Fifty Shades of Grey, at age forty-eight, Beyond the Margins rounds up many other famous authors whose first work appeared after age forty [6].

From Plato to Joan Didion, Lapham's Quarterly examines belief in sympathetic magic and other superstitions [7].

M. J. Rose discusses the pressure on authors to engage with social media [8], such as Twitter and Facebook. (Writer Unboxed)

Newsweek published an excerpt from D. T. Max's new biography of David Foster Wallace [9], Every Love Story is a Ghost Story.

Joanna Neborsky has illustrated a partial inventory of Gustave Flaubert’s personal effects [10], which were listed twelve days after the author's death in 1880. (Explore)