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:
Borders will soon start selling Build-A-Bear merchandise in its retail bookstores. “As more books are bought online or in digital format than bought at retail, it creates really the ultimate strategic challenge in terms of redefining the bookstore,” said the company's CEO. “We are totally rethinking it.” (Bloomberg)
In related news, Borders is closing a big retail store in San Francisco this fall (San Francisco Examiner), and Barnes & Noble is closing a "massive" outlet near Lincoln Center in New York City. (New York Daily News)
For the fifth "poetry rain" project from Chilean art collective Casagrande, "poetry rained from the skies on Saturday night in Berlin as 100,000 bookmarks printed with poems by 80 poets from Germany and Chile were dropped on the city from a helicopter." (Guardian)
Why does Wired think e-books cost so much?
According to Publishers Weekly, the Beijing Book Fair that began yesterday is off to a great start with the mood optimistic and international publishers seeing heavy traffic in their aisles.
Check out this cool "literary jewelry" made out of books through a "unique laminating process." "The paper is selected and carefully removed from a book, and the jewelry re-inserted in the excavated space." (Littlefly)
Los Angeles's second Lit Crawl was this past Saturday and Jacket Copy has a nice roundup of the event.
"Which is funnier: a comedian performing poetry or a poet trying their hand at comedy?" The Guardian reports on the "increasingly blurred boundaries between comedy and poetry."
