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:
Several California groups, including the California Alliance for Retired Americans, have launched a boycott of Amazon, in protest of its efforts to erase a new California law that requires Internet retailers to collect sales tax. Critics of the boycott claim the giant retailer Walmart sponsors the protest. (Bay Citizen via Shelf Awareness)
Red Fox Books, an independent bookstore in Glens Falls, New York, is closing shop.
Novelist Tom Perrota is the latest literary star to ink a deal with HBO. No stranger to adaptation, two of his books, Election and Little Children, were made into Oscar-nominated films. His new novel, The Leftovers, due out at the end of this month, will be adapted into a dramatic series (Los Angeles Times). In light of this news, publishing-industry journalist Sarah Weinman provides an informal breakdown of authors optioned or greenlit at HBO in 2011.
Have you noticed those strange pixel squares popping up everywhere? They're called Quick Response codes, and can be used to add supplemental material to printed text. Publishing Perspectives asks if they will become the standard for enhancing print books.
Anis Shivani, a provocative poetry critic at Huffington Post, has sparked a flame war after writing an essay entitled, "Philip Levine and Other Mediocrities: What it Takes to Ascend to the Poet Laureateship." (Harriet)
If you missed the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park in New York City, never fear, you may happen upon an underground-theater version of the Bard's plays on the subway. (New York Times)
Essayist David Sedaris has announced that he is not running for president of the United States in 2012. (Vanity Fair)
Full Stop, a new online magazine "committed to an earnest, expansive, and rigorous discussion of literature and literary culture," takes a look at two new anthologies, Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing and Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century, and delves into the post-modern landscape of found poetry and constraint-based texts, examining the burgeoning trend of conceptual poetry.
