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:
Take it from Ann Patchett, "No one should ever go into debt to study creative writing." The Los Angeles Times highlights points of writer-wisdom from Patchett's essay "The Getaway Car," published last week by Byliner as a $2.99 Kindle single.
Could a book soundtrack really help readers plug into a story? The Atlantic reviews Booktrack, purveyor of e-books and "sound-enhanced reading" experiences to accompany them.
Next week marks the first public event for the library at the Poetry Foundation's new digs in Chicago, home to a collection of poetry books started nearly a century ago. (American Libraries)
BookFinder, a subsidiary of bookseller AbeBooks, tracks the most sought-after out-of-print titles of the past twelve months. Madonna's Sex caps the list, but titles by Philip K. Dick (in a non-science-fiction turn), W. Somerset Maugham, and Filipino poet and short story writer José Garcia Villa also make the top one hundred.
Germany's prestigious Goethe Prize goes for the first time to an Arabic-speaking writer. Syrian-born poet Adonis took the fifty-thousand-euro award, worth approximately seventy-two thousand dollars. (Guardian)
After years of operating under a regime that "killed the local culture of reading" in Tripoli, a bookstore is among first businesses to reopen in the city following the overthrow of Muammar el-Qadaffi's government. (Christian Science Monitor)
Kashmir's literary festival has been canceled after authors took issue with the suppression of free speech in the region. "A literary festival, by definition, is an event that celebrates the free flow of ideas and opinions," says an open letter that received more than two hundred signatures. "To hold it in a context where some basic fundamental rights are markedly absent, indeed, denied to the population, is to commit a travesty." (Wall Street Journal)
