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:
Montana's attorney general has opened an investigation into the finances of the charity set up and run by Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson. (USA Today) Salon's Laura Miller says that Mortenson's accusers are missing the point.
Norman Mailer's apartment in Brooklyn, New York, which he specially designed with two flights of ladders, a crow's nest, and, at one point, a trapeze, is up for sale for $2.5 million. (City Room)
What is the way forward for the novel? Garth Risk Hallberg at the Millions takes a closer look.
After thirty-two years in Ann Arbor, Michigan, David's Books will soon close its doors. Notably, the owner of the indie bookstore was in legal trouble a few years back for hiring "drug addicts to steal textbooks from competitors and later [sell] them on the Internet." (AnnArbor.com)
If you order a lot of books from Amazon, watch out! As MobyLives points out, the fact that the online retail giant doesn't pay state sales tax may come back to haunt its customers, who could get audited by the IRS for not paying state tax on purchases made through Amazon.
The British Library has purchased the archive of poet Wendy Cope, including over forty thousand emails. "This is the second major email acquisition we've made after Harold Pinter's archive in 2007, but contains more material than that," said one library curator. "We are increasingly acquiring digital material; this is going to be the norm as we move forward and we are going to get to the stage where emails replace physical letters." (Independent)
A year ago to the day, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven people and starting a giant oil leak that would spill and spill for months. The Los Angeles Times rounded up books written about the calamity.
Here are ten ways digital books are changing our literary lives, from the Denver Post.
