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:
Former street entertainer Taffy Thomas will spend two years traveling the British Isles and spinning yarns in his new role as the country’s first storyteller laureate (Independent).
About eighty authors and printers will exhibit on Saturday at the first Self-Publishing Book Expo in New York City (Publishers Weekly).
Barnes & Noble is reportedly looking for talent to spearhead the overseas expansion of its online division, BN.com (Bookseller).
Continuing a trend this season, Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot series has become the latest franchise to undergo posthumous expansion, with authorized additions set to be penned by fantasy author Mickey Zucker Reichert (Guardian).
Vladimir Nabokov’s final work, The Original of Laura, arrives mid-month from Knopf, but arguments still swirl over whether the unfinished novel should have been published at all (Guardian).
Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee is at work on a big-screen adaptation of Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi (Harcourt, 2001) (Bookseller).
In other film news, music critic Chuck Klosterman’s memoir Fargo Rock City (Scribner, 2001) is under adaptation by David Letterman writer Tom Ruprecht and Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn (Hollywood Reporter).
Authors Carlos Fuentes, Orhan Pamuk, and Mario Vargas Llosa are headlining this year’s Guadalajara International Book Fair, which runs from November 28 to December 6 (Associated Press).
After demanding that author Lauren Myracle remove potentially offensive terms such as “geez” from her latest children’s book, Scholastic has pulled the title from its elementary school fairs over Myracle's refusal to replace a character’s same-sex parents with a heterosexual couple (Guardian).
