E-Book Price-Fixing Lawsuit, Frank O’Hara's Lunch Poems, and More

by
Evan Smith Rakoff
3.8.12

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:

The Wall Street Journal reports that the United States Justice Department intends to sue Apple and five of the largest publishing houses for alleged collusion regarding e-book pricing.

Michael Taeckens, who has worked at Algonquin Books for over eleven years as publicity director, and later as online and paperback marketing director, will move to Graywolf Press as its new marketing director beginning April 16. (Shelf Awareness)

Inspired by the BBC series that attempts to tell the history of the world using one hundred objects, the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC is telling the story of New York City focusing on ten objects. Number six on its list is Frank O’Hara’s 1964 collection Lunch Poems.

Michael Dirda writes of how Edgar Rice Burroughs worked as a "rancher and gold miner, started an advertising agency, sold light bulbs and candy and uplifting books door-to-door" and finally was an impoverished pencil-sharpener salesman—had failed at everything—then decided to write a novel. (Barnes and Noble Review)

The current episode of Other People with Brad Listi features writer, attorney, and pioneer book-blogger Maud Newton, as well as notes from the recent AWP conference in Chicago.

Nashville Scene discusses the digital reissue of Poetry Out Loud, an avant-garde 1960s spoken word audio magazine that famously rejected Allen Ginsberg.

The staff blog of the Los Angeles Review of Books looks at the work of Víctor Terán, a poet and activist attempting to save his endangered Isthmus Zapotec language in Mexico.

Perhaps noting the viral success of Samuel L. Jackson's reading of the best-selling children's book for adults, Adam Mansbach's Go the F**k to Sleep, Audible today launched its A-list, literature read by heavy-hitting celebrities, including Kate Winslet, Susan Sarandon, and Anne Hathaway. (New York Daily News)

Meanwhile, Lists of Notes features a selection of books Ernest Hemingway claimed in 1935 he "would rather read again for the first time" than have a million dollars a year.