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:
A novel completed by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Oscar Hijuelos shortly before his death last October will be released posthumously by Grand Central Publishing in the fall of 2015. Twain and Stanley Enter Paradise, a book twelve years in the making, chronicles the friendship between author Mark Twain and Welsh explorer Henry Morton Stanley. (New York Times)
Former president George W. Bush has written a biography of his father, former president George H. W. Bush. The as-yet-untitled book will be released November 11 by Crown. (Associated Press)
The closing date for the sale of Perseus Books Group to Hachette Book Group and Ingram Content Group has been delayed. Rather than concluding today, as was originally planned, the sale is now expected to be completed at the end of August. (Publishers Weekly)
The Ossining, New York, home of John Cheever—purchased by the writer and his wife, Mary, in 1961 and frequented by authors Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and John Updike, among others—is on sale for $525,000. (Newsweek)
As violence continues between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, Verso Books has posted a 2009 interview, translated from the French, with historian Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish People and The Invention of the Land of Israel, who spoke out against the Gaza War at that time.
The Horsham District Council in West Sussex, England, has named a garbage truck “Pig Pen Sedaris” in honor of author David Sedaris, who has a home in the town and is known for picking up trash on the side of the road during his daily walks. (Time)
The Arizona in-laws of a late New York Public Library patron who in 1959 checked out Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique, an erotic manual published in 1926 by Dutch gynecologist Theodoor H. Van de Velde, returned the book to the library with a note apologizing for the book’s fifty-four-year tardiness. (Gothamist)
Meanwhile, the sixty-two branches of the Queens Library system in Queens, New York, boast some of the most diverse collections in the country, with more than 800,000 foreign-language books and thousands of DVDs and CDs in non-English languages. The system also sponsors a variety of programming for the borough’s residents, of whom nearly half were born outside of the United States. (NPR)
