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:
Novelist David Bowman, author of Let the Dog Drive, and Bunny Modern, passed away in late February of a cerebral hemorrhage. His wife, Chloe Wing, announced his death this week. In 1989, Mr. Bowman was struck by a car, which resulted in near-total amnesia. Before the accident, he'd completed a draft of his first novel, and the process of reading his manuscript helped him regain his identity. (New York Times)
In the ongoing court battle over book scans, Google seeks to dismiss the Authors Guild class-action suit "because the guild doesn't claim to own the copyrights at issue, it can't sue on behalf of authors." (Shelf Awareness)
Mira Ptacin, the creator of the popular Freerange Nonfiction monthly readings in New York City, offers advice on how to host a literary reading series. (Moonshot)
GalleyCat highlights how authors can use the new YouTube Time Machine for research.
Satirist Andrew Shaffer wrote Fifty Shames of Earl Grey, his parody of erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey in ten days, which promptly sold to Da Capo Press. The creative mind behind the Twitter personas Evil Wylie and Emperor Franzen didn't spare himself when he tweeted the news, "Hack writer sells 50 Shades of Grey parody," Shaffer wrote. (New York Times)
Time magazine visits author John Irving at his Vermont home.
By examining extensive publishing company records relating to the brief and remarkable career of Jane Austen, scholar Kathryn Sutherland asks, "Might a context in book production rather than the cult of domestic personality yield…something more to the purpose in tracing the life of a writer?" (OUPBlog)
The show, Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language, which runs from this Sunday through August 27 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, includes John Giorno's famous Dial-a-Poem project, which began in 1968, and featured numerous poets, such as John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, and Diane Di Prima. Listeners can hear the original recordings on the museum's website, or access the project on any phone by calling 347-763-8001. (New York Times)
For Friday, real talk from your editor.
