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Two American journalists who were arrested on March 17, presumably at the border between North Korea and China, have been tried and sentenced to twelve years hard labor, North Korea’s official news agency, KCNA, recently announced. The state agency accused the women, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, of “illegal border crossing” and described their punishment as “reform through labor.”
ScrollMotion, a developer of applications for Apple's iPhone, announced yesterday that it will release a new digital book reader for the device that will offer users a more comprehensive reading experience.
McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers says his quarterly’s next issue intends to prove the viability of print by adopting a newspaper format. Eggers made the announcement at an Authors Guild gathering in New York City last month, where he was being feted for his charity work with the nonprofit 826 National.
Between January and April, Oxford University Press added 1.5 million public “tweets” to its Oxford English Corpus, a vast electronic database that collects examples of words in context. Among the findings: Language use on Twitter tends to focus on the self and the present, while the social networking service’s insistence on brevity gives rise to some creative solutions.
On a warm, breezy Saturday evening, hundreds of people who had spent the past three days at the annual BookExpo America took a break from the hubbub to attend You Are Not Alone, a celebration featuring comedy, music, and, of course, some top-notch literature.
Nobel laureate Toni Morrison was the featured guest at last night’s inauguration of the Free Speech Leadership Council, a new initiative organized by the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC). As part of the event, Morrison spoke with author Fran Lebowitz at the home of council chair and former HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman in New York City.
Tin House magazine turns ten this year, and Literary Arts, a cultural organization located in the magazine’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, is gathering over a dozen notable writers to celebrate the occasion.
J. D. Salinger is taking legal action against the writer of an alleged sequel to The Catcher in the Rye.
One of the big stories out of BookExpo America, the annual book publishing event held this past weekend at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City, was Google's discussions with publishers about its plans for a new e-book program.
Alex Clark, the first female editor of Granta, has left the magazine after only eight months in the position. In a statement released yesterday, the London-based quarterly announced that American editor John Freeman will immediately take the helm as acting editor.
