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:
Hogarth Press, the publisher that Virginia and Leonard Woolf started in the drawing room of their home in a London suburb, celebrates its centennial this week. Now an imprint of Penguin Random House, Hogarth is one of the few presses established in the interwar period that has survived. (Guardian)
“Somewhere at Google there is a database containing twenty-five million books and nobody is allowed to read them.” James Somers chronicles the history of the Google Books project, its efforts to digitize all the books in the world—a list that in 2010 Google estimated to include 129,864,880 titles—and its legal tussle with the Authors Guild over copyright infringement. (Atlantic)
Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has made another round of layoffs this week, just one week after announcing it will cut back its workforce by 8 to 10 percent. Approximately twenty employees in the trade division were laid off; it is unknown how many employees were let go across all divisions. (Publishers Weekly)
Robert M. Pirsig, the author of the novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, died yesterday at age eighty-eight. (New York Times)
From Alexander Pope to Emily Dickinson to Barack Obama, Megan McCullough looks at how literature proves the importance of hope. (Signature)
Kaveh Akbar interviews fellow poet Monica Youn about writing poems from both a sense of shame and a “hyperanalytic lawyer mode;” form as a consequence of tone; and dismantling ideas of women as property. (Divedapper)
Writer Phil Klay shares what he’s reading in the latest installment of Mother Jones’s “Resistance Reading” series, in which “authors pick books that bring solace and understanding in an age of rancor.”
TechCrunch considers what Saint George’s Day—a Spanish holiday celebrated on April 23 and akin to Valentine’s Day where couples exchange roses and books—proves about the value of printed books versus e-books.
