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:
Barely a month after leaving Random House, Stephen Rubin has been named president and publisher of Henry Holt (Wall Street Journal).
Three award-winning Minneapolis publishers—along with the nation’s largest literary center—are celebrating significant anniversaries this season with a city-wide scavenger hunt: “Around the Literary Twin Cities in (Almost) Eighty Days.”
A new book blames the early death of Romantic poet John Keats—who succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five—on his bungling physician (Telegraph).
According to a joint statement released yesterday, Barnes & Noble will both sell and supply content for the recently unveiled Plastic Logic e-reader (Press Release).
Calling book digitization “a tsunami breaking over Europe,” French culture minister Frédéric Mitterrand is pressing EU member nations to adopt a common position on the issue (Bookseller).
Children’s writer Melvin Burgess and Booker Prize-winner Ben Okri are among the authors who have been experimenting with so-called “Twitterfiction” (Guardian). Meanwhile, the impending publication of Penguin’s Twitterature—which boils about sixty classic works down to a series of 140-character bursts—is drawing mixed reactions (Washington Post).
A Harry Potter-themed dinner party at a private home in London has been nixed after Warner Brothers flexed its legal muscles (Telegraph).
According to Variety, author Augusten Burroughs—whose novel Sellevision (St. Martin’s, 2000) was recently picked up by NBC—is working on two television projects for CBS, including an adaptation of his alcoholism memoir Dry (St. Martin’s, 2003).
O Marketeers! A new advertising campaign for Levi’s jeans features a soundtrack by Walt Whitman, including an audio recording believed to have been made by the poet himself (Slate).
