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:
This year's post-Thanksgiving shoppers spent almost 7 percent more than last year on Black Friday (CNBC); President Obama took his daughters to shop at a Washington bookstore on Small Business Saturday (Fox); and today being Cyber Monday, Amazon is offering 75 percent off select e-books.
Meanwhile, Laura Miller at Salon examines how supporting independent bookstores keeps our literary culture alive.
Poet Daisy Fried reviews Herbert Leibowitz's "cranky, unapologetically self-assertive, infidelity-obsessed, interesting and idiosyncratic book," Something Urgent I Have to Say to You: The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams, for the New York Times.
Seventy years after it was written by a twenty-year-old merchant marine named Jack Kerouac, The Sea Is My Brother—the Beat Generation founder's first novel—has been published by Penguin. The Guardian's reviewer writes, "Sadly it would take another fifteen years and colossal amounts of Benzedrine for the genius to emerge; there's certainly none here."
In an excerpt from The Household Tips of the Great Writers, Mark Crick imagines Raymond Chandler's recipe for Lamb with Dill Sauce: "I needed a table at Maxim's, a hundred bucks and a gorgeous blonde; what I had was a leg of lamb and no clues." (Independent)
Margaret Atwood personally illustrated the e-book version of her latest book, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. (Flavorwire)
In light of the recent biography of Kurt Vonnegut, And So It Goes by Charles Shields, Brain Pickings ponders what the Occupy movement can learn from the late satirist.
Ninety-six-year-old poet Ruth Stone, who won the National Book Award in 2002 at the age of eighty-seven for her collection In the Next Galaxy, has passed away. (New York Times)
