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:
There are six screen adaptations of books nominated for Oscars this year. The publishing industry supplying stories for movies is as old as Hollywood itself, however, the Hollywood Reporter examines what happens when book publishers attempt to take control of film production.
The Reader’s Digest Association gave pink slips to forty employees of its Weekly Reader group, a division recently sold to Scholastic. (New York Post)
Parties to celebrate and promote the release of a book are usually not ticketed events, yet the one held for Cristina Alger‘s debut novel, The Darlings, which took place yesterday at the Palace Hotel, and cost fifteen dollars for the privilege of attending, sold out. (GalleyCat)
"Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so." Jana Prikryl discusses the significance of John Berryman’s The Dream Songs. (Paris Review)
Writer and filmmaker Michele Poulos has launched a Kickstarter campaign to create a documentary film about the late poet Larry Levis. (Harriet)
Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, writes of the importance of his personal library: "My books are not dead weight, they are live weight—matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time."
Laura Miller weighs in on the death of chick lit. (Salon)
From the department of interesting items found online, A Death in the Family author James Agee collaborated on this short film shot with photographer Helen Levitt in 1948 on the child-filled streets of New York City. (Dailymotion)
