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:
Amazon announced today that an international version of its Kindle reading device—complete with global wireless capability and multilingual content—will begin shipping on October 19 (Press Release).
Justice Department officials will have a hand in renegotiating the $125 million Google Book Search settlement, which is the subject of a “status hearing” in federal court today (Associated Press).
Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore is launching a publishing company: Ecstatic Peace Library—also the name of Moore’s record label—will release art books by Kim Gordon, Dave Markey, and Raymond Pettibon (NME).
Harvard University has purchased the manuscripts, letters, and other papers of two-time Pulitzer-winner and Class of ’54 alumnus John Updike, who died last January (Boston Globe). Meanwhile, the Huntington Library in San Marino, California—which already houses the archives of Charles Bukowski, Jack London, and Christopher Isherwood—has acquired the papers of late science fiction author Octavia Butler (Press Release).
Despite a rash of closures, new research says independent bookstores in the U.K. have managed to increase their share of the consumer market this year (Bookseller).
Hoping to profit from the increasing overlap of the literary and digital domains, Nintendo Germany has set up shop in a major Cologne bookstore (Publishing Perspectives).
In a break with his predecessor—who famously opined that American literature was too insular to enjoy global relevance—the chief jurist of the Nobel Prize for Literature has suggested that the Swedish Academy may be overly “Eurocentric” in its outlook. The prize—for which American Joyce Carol Oates is in the running—is expected to be awarded tomorrow (Associated Press).
