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:

The Daily Beast offers a life-affirming reading list [2] for 2014. The books, which offer transformative insights and practical wisdom, include Thaddeus Russell’s A Renegade History of the United States and How To Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto by Tom Hodgkinson.

In the wake of a plagiarism scandal, actor Shia LaBeouf apologized, on New Year's Day, to Daniel Clowes [3] by commissioning a skywritten message. (Variety)

Kitchen Sink Press, which published the work of graphic novelists Charles Burns, Will Eisner, and R. Crumb [4], among others, has donated its archives to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. (New York Times)

BBC News ponders why Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon is a successful tourist destination, while the birthplace of George Eliot in nearby Nuneaton [5] struggles for attention.

PBS recently spoke with Dick Davis, a poet and scholar who is introducing medieval Persian literature [6] to the West. 

Michael Greenberg considers the revelations in Professor Borges, a book that examines the lectures from an English literature course taught by the renowned Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges [7] in 1966. (New York Review of Books)

Test your literary knowledge [8] with a quiz gleaned from former Amazon blogger and Jeopardy champion Tom Nissley’s A Reader’s Book of Days. (Los Angeles Times)