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:
Apple reached a settlement on Monday in a civil class-action lawsuit filed by a group of consumers and several states. The settlement depends upon the results of the company’s appeal of a decision by district judge Denise Cote, who found Apple to be in violation of antitrust laws at the conclusion of the e-book price fixing case last year. (Publishers Weekly)
South Carolina governor Nikki Haley approved a budgetary item requiring the College of Charleston and the University of South Carolina Upstate, which both receive state funding, to spend $52,000 and $17,000, respectively, on curricula relating to the U.S. Constitution and other founding documents. The amounts reflect what each school previously spent on LGBT-themed materials, including the graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel and Out Loud: The Best of Rainbow Radio, a collection of essays edited by poet Ed Madden and pastor Candace Chellew-Hodge. The state House of Representatives voted in March to cut the schools’ budgets by those amounts; in May the State Senate restored the funding, with the stipulation that each school must include "the study of and devotion to American institutions and ideals” in its curricula. (Advocate)
Today, Blue Rider Press releases The Last Magazine, a novel by the late journalist Michael Hastings. (New York Times)
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri has been appointed to the full-time faculty of Princeton University, where she will teach creative writing. (Princeton)
Joy Castro writes of the troubling characterizations of people of color in Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Goldfinch. (Salon)
Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti recently announced the city’s search for a new poet laureate, who will serve from August 2014 until October 2016 and receive $10,000 a year. The Department of Cultural Affairs is accepting applications until July 1. (Downtown News)
Despite launching in Norway two weeks ago, Google Play Books currently lists no Norwegian books among its available titles. (Melville House)
While British novelist Tim Parks recently asserted in the New York Review of Books that the Internet is killing the novel by distracting its audience, several writers and publishers, including John Banville and Sam Jordison, have recently spoken out in opposition to Parks’s complaints. (Guardian)
