Neil Gaiman Lands The Simpsons, JFK Library Goes Digital, and More

by Staff
1.14.11

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:

Stieg Larsson's partner plans to finish the author's fourth novel in the Millennium series. Larsson had written two hundred pages before he died. (Guardian)

The first Oxford American Summit for Ambitious Writers, a five-day residential workshop, will take place in Arkansas as a collaboration between the Oxford American Magazine and the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute. (Jacket Copy)

The English chain British Bookshops was placed into administration—similar to bankruptcy—raising fears of layoffs among the three hundred employees at its fifty-one stores across the South of England. (Independent) Also, a few publishers have stopped distributing books to it. (Bookseller)

By taping an episode of The Simpsons this week in which he appears as himself, author Neil Gaiman has joined an elite group of writers granted the singular honor including John Updike, Thomas Pynchon, Gore Vidal, Jonathan Franzen, Tom Wolfe, Stephen King, J. K. Rowling, and Stephen Jay Gould. (Guardian)

While Washington, D.C. may have had reason to celebrate its ranking as the country' most literate city, Las Vegas was left to reckon with its standing as the fifty-second most literate city. (Las Vegas Sun)

The JFK presidential library is digitizing its entire contents, including secret telephone conversations about the Cuban Missile Crisis. (BBC)

Michael Chabon weighs in on the controversy over the new sterilized edition of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the Atlantic.

According to police records and reporting in the Wall Street Journal, Arizona shooting suspect Jared Lee Loughner "rattled" other students in his Advanced Poetry Writing class at Pima Community College with comments like "why don't we just strap bombs to babies," and displayed an "obsession with grammar."