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:
PEN is continuing to demand the release of dissident Chinese author Liu Xiaobo, who was imprisoned a year ago for his part in the creation of Charter 08, a petition calling for political reform, human rights, and an end to single-party rule (Press Release).
Responding to concerns voiced earlier this year by advocates for the visually impaired, Amazon says the next version of the Kindle will include larger font options and improved text-to-speech capability (Press Release).
A handful of New York Times reporters have accepted buyout offers in what a source says is only the “first round” of layoffs (Business Insider).
About five hundred handwritten pages from the manuscripts of lesser-known works by French author Stendhal have been digitized and made available—alongside painstaking, annotated transcriptions—by the Grenoble public library (Guardian).
In other library news, American Libraries, the magazine of the American Library Association, is beta testing a new Web site and will make the transition official in January.
An excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s unfinished final novel, The Pale King (to be published by Little, Brown this spring), appears in next week’s issue of the New Yorker.
A new theory blames Jane Austen’s early death—long attributed to Addison’s disease—on tuberculosis contracted from livestock (Guardian).
Meanwhile, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the undead remix of Austen’s classic novel, is reportedly under adaptation as a miniseries (io9).
The Nook went on display at select Barnes & Noble locations yesterday, but in-store sales of the device have been pushed back until early 2010 (Reuters).
