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:
South African Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee is "one of the world's great literary recluses," according to the Guardian. (He did not show up to collect either of his Booker prizes.) So it was quite notable when, at the Writers' Centre Worlds Literature Festival in Norwich, England, last week, "the author 'took his place at the podium with a small smile' and went on to 'rock the house.'"
Another famous literary recluse, Harper Lee, granted her first interview since 2006 to the Mail on Sunday on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of her classic work To Kill a Mockingbird. The reporter was given one strict condition: "Don't mention the Mockingbird."
Ray Bradbury, "who has had a fairly public presence in southern California, has been notably absent since he was injured in a fall a few months ago," the Los Angeles Times reported. Bradbury turns ninety in August, but turned up this Saturday with Pixies' frontman Black Francis (er, Frank Black) to promote a new book of interviews with the legendary author.
Barnes & Noble is "having easily the best year in its history," according to Publishers Weekly.
Last month, the celebrated poet Marie Ponsot had a stroke at the age of eighty-nine. As the New York Times reports, Ponsot has since experienced a loss of syntax that has been a matter of "explosive astonishment—realizing that language is everything in the egg," the poet said. "You take it for granted."
Fortune interviewed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos about the future of the book.
Sammy Hagar, the former "bombastic frontman" of Van Halen, will publish a memoir with HarperCollins in 2011. (Blabbermouth)
Wendell Berry, a poet and life-long environmental activist, has decided to pull his personal papers from the University of Kentucky archives because of the university's ties with the coal industry. (Lexington Herald-Leader)
