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:
Nigeria's Farafina Books, which publishes the work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is "leading a revolution in the movement to publish books by Africans for Africans," according to Publishing Perspectives.
A new exhibition of literary manuscripts at the British Library features Jane Austen's "neat, looped writing, occasionally scoured out with thick, angry black lines." (Telegraph)
Forbes published a list of the ten top-earning authors in the world starring the usual suspects.
James Patterson, who writes about eight books a year "with a team of collaborators," is the highest-paid author in the world, having earned around seventy million dollars in the last year. "These books are entertainments," Patterson told the Guardian. "It's a very different process than if you're trying to write Moby-Dick, or The Corrections. That's painful. That's different from very simple, plot-oriented storytelling. If I was writing serious fiction, I'd want more rest time."
Preeminent multitasker James Franco penned an essay for Vanity Fair about his process for portraying a young Allen Ginsberg in the biopic Howl, which hits theaters in late September.
Pop star Ricky Martin has a memoir due out from Penguin on November 2. (Billboard)
A Berkeley City Council candidate in California submitted a poem in rhyming quatrains as his candidate's ballot statement. (Berkeleyside)
The Hook, a weekly newspaper out of Charlottesville, Virginia, ran a cover feature investigating the circumstances surrounding the recent suicide of Kevin Morrissey, managing editor of Virginia Quarterly Review.
