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:

Los Angeles poet laureate Eloise Klein Healy is recovering from a medical issue [2] and has canceled all upcoming events. (GalleyCat)

There's a free app to help navigate the massive Los Angeles Times Festival of Books [3] this weekend on the campus of USC.

Authors in Venice, Italy, have mobilized to save the city's bookshops [4]. (Bookseller)

Novelist Ben Dolnick reveals the writing tricks he's used and ones he's discarded [5]: “I’ve sold all but one of my microphones, put away my mini-notebooks, stopped scouring the Internet for scraps of wisdom.” (New York Times)

Emily O’Neill tallies the cost of this year's submission fees, contests, and writing workshops [6]. (Billfold)

Faber announced its new immersive e-book of The Thirty-Nine Steps [7] breaks new ground in the medium. The famous thriller by Scottish novelist John Buchan was first published as a serial in 1915. (Guardian)

For her premiere craft blog post, Graywolf Press publisher Fiona McCrae discusses first pages [8]: “Bad opening pages are all alike…too many adjectives, clunky sentences, and clichés combine to create insurmountable dullness.”

The Financial Times looks at Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir [9]by Greg Bellow, out next week from Bloomsbury.