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:
After much ballyhoo, Google has launched eBooks, its Internet bookstore. (Telegraph) As Jacket Copy notes, Google now becomes the third major online books retailer after Amazon and Apple. O'Reilly Radar has three tips for getting Google to notice your ebook. Here's the take from the New York Times, and Bookseller has a roundup of other media outlet reactions to the launch.
A previously unpublished Philip Larkin poem called "Dear Jake" was found in a shoebox at Hull University in England recently. A documentary exploring Larkin's relationship with the addressee of the poem, his secretary and lover Betty Mackereth, will appear on BBC4 tonight. (Guardian)
Meet today's new genre: Dictator-lit. (Guardian)
William Ackman, an investor who owns a 37 percent stake in Borders, is reportedly preparing a bid to purchase Barnes & Noble. (Publishers Weekly)
The handwritten first draft of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is now on display in Britain for the first time as part of an exhibit that features her work alongside that of her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and her parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. The exhibit travels to New York City next year. (Daily Mail)
Oprah picked a couple of Charles Dickens's nineteenth-century novels as her next book club selection: Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. (Publishers Weekly)
Speaking of Oprah's Book Club, not everyone was pleased with Jonathan Franzen's selection for the club, or with his appearance on the show yesterday. (New York Daily News)
Do psychologists make better novelists? (Guardian)
