Article Archive: News and Trends

On April 4, United States District Court Judge John F. Keenan ruled in favor of Stuart Y. Silverstein in a plagiarism suit he filed against Penguin Putnam in 2001. Silverstein, who compiled Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker (Scribner, 1996), claimed in his lawsuit that Penguin infringed on his copyright by publishing Dorothy Parker: Complete Poems, which includes a section titled “Poems Uncollected by Parker,” the identical poems published in Not Much Fun.

Five years ago, in the early morning of July 24, 1998, Thomas Wolfe’s childhood home in Asheville, North Carolina, was nearly destroyed by fire. Since then, conservation specialists and staff at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial have worked to reconstruct the museum and hope to reopen it this fall.

Literary MagNet chronicles the start-ups and closures, successes and failures, anniversaries and accolades, changes of editorship and special issues—in short, the news and trends—of literary magazines in America. This issue's MagNet features Maize, Our Time Is Now, UR-VOX, Smartish Pace, and the Beloit Poetry Journal.

The UN has declared the next ten years the UN Literacy Decade. During this period the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization will initiate its "International Plan of Action," designed to mobilize national governments, public and private organizations, universities, and local communities to create literacy programs, research who will most benefit from such programs, and find ways to monitor their success so that they can be improved upon and replicated elsewhere.

Amanda Davis, author of the short story collection Circling the Drain and cornerstone presence to many in and beyond the literary world, died in a plane crash on March 15, 2003, while on tour promoting her first novel, Wonder When You'll Miss Me.

During the past year, poets laureate have been the unlikely recipients of national media attention. New Jersey's Amiri Baraka was excoriated for reading a poem that some labeled anti-Semitic, and California's Quincy Troupe resigned after inaccuracies were discovered on his resumé. With their public profiles growing, the role of poets laureate is being called into question. In April the nation's first conference for state poets laureate will convene in Manchester, New Hampshire, where they will discuss poetry and their responsibilities as public representatives of their art. 

To coincide with National Poetry Month, the Library of America, a nonprofit publisher of American classics, will launch the American Poets Project, a new series of books devoted to individual poets and anthologies exploring particular themes, genres, and eras. 

British novelist Hong Ying faces a "defamation of the dead" lawsuit in China for her book K: The Art of Love, a fictional portrayal of the love affair between Bloomsbury poet Julian Bell and the celebrated Chinese writer and painter Ling Shuhua.

Naropa University has established the Naropa Audio Preservation and Access Project to archive the program's vast holdings of recorded readings, lectures, panel discussions, and workshops.

Literary MagNet chronicles the start-ups and closures, successes and failures, anniversaries and accolades, changes of editorship and special issues—in short, the news and trends—of literary magazines in America. This issue's MagNet features New Letters, Brick, The Ohio Review, 96 Inc, Poetry Review, Gloss, and Explorations.

After finishing About a Boy by Nick Hornby, a reader in New York City left it on a Starbucks magazine rack with hopes that someone would pick up the novel and read it. Two days later a reader from Delta, British Columbia, found the book, took it back to Canada, read it, and left it in the waiting room of a dentist's office, where it found its way into the hands of another local reader. The tracking of such a literary journey is made possible by a unique online book club called BookCrossing.com.