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:
Jamey Rodemeyer, an adolescent victim of bullying, committed suicide this week. He maintained several blogs and posted his writing online, as well as an “It Gets Better, I Promise” video, which GalleyCat calls "a heartbreaking portrait of a young writer," and offers five ways "writers and readers can help fight bullying and save lives."
Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez's 1996 book, News of a Kidnapping, sold out in Tehran this week, after opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi stated that Márquez's depiction of Colombian kidnappings reflect his situation under house arrest. Mousavi and fellow opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi have been detained since February. (Guardian)
A Pennsylvania school has decided to close production of the musical Kismet, which is a love story about a Muslim street poet, set more than one thousand years ago in Baghdad. With music by Alexander Borodin, and based on the 1911 play by Edward Knoblock, it won the Tony Award for best musical in 1954, and a film adaptation was released the following year. Community members complained about the timing of the performance falling too close to the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The school will stage Oklahoma! instead. (Fox News)
Amazon's Kindle e-books are now available at over eleven thousand libraries. (Wall Street Journal)
The Federal Trade Commission has no antitrust objections to Liberty Media's preferred-stock investment in Barnes & Noble, which will give Liberty Media two seats on the bookstore chain's board of directors. (Shelf Awareness)
BBC radio recently asked a handful of publishing leaders for their thoughts on the "future of the book," and Spectator provides a transcription of their predictions.
In the New Republic, Ruth Franklin writes of the new translation of Élisabeth Gille's 1992 book, The Mirador, which is composed in the imagined voice of the author's mother, the French novelist Irène Némirovsky, whose book Suite Française, details the war years in France, "Yet this is no life of a saint. It is, rather, a daughter’s fearless reckoning with a mother whose actions must have been deeply difficult to come to terms with."
If you're curious about the nature of Southern writer Eudora Welty's Mississippi garden before it fell into neglect, a new book, One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place, documents its restoration in the ten years since the death of the acclaimed writer. (Garden & Gun)
