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Isobel Abulhoul, director of the new Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature (EAIFL), recently informed British novelist Geraldine Bedell that she could not be a part of the event because one of the characters in her forthcoming novel is gay.
After a week of uncertainty, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced today that members of the House and Senate conference committee have negotiated to keep the fifty million dollars that the House of Representatives had designated for the NEA in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The funding, which the House approved on January 28 as part of the stimulus package put forward by president Barack Obama, was cut from the Senate's version of the bill last Friday.
Two months after Markus Dohle announced a dramatic restructuring of Random House imprints, a move that eliminated Stephen Rubin's position as publisher of Doubleday Publishing Group, the Random House chairman yesterday named Rubin publisher at large.
Page Six Magazine, the New York Post's celebrity and gossip supplement, published on Monday a feature in which the editors named the fifty "hottest bachelors" in New York City. Among the rock stars, real estate moguls, and fashionistas on the list are two authors, Salman Rushdie and Keith Gessen.
Publishing giant HarperCollins joined the industry-wide restructuring movement on Tuesday, announcing the closing of an imprint and the dismissal of two of its top executives.
At an elaborate, much-hyped presentation at the Morgan Library in New York City yesterday, Amazon unveiled the Kindle 2, an improved version of its popular e-book reader. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says the upgraded device, which will be available February 24 and will carry a price tag of $359, has more memory, faster page turning, a sharper display, and a longer battery life than its predecessor, which was launched in 2007.
The United States Senate voted on Friday to cut funding for the arts from the economic recovery bill. The amendment to the bill, offered by Republican senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, passed by a wide margin, seventy-three votes to twenty-four. The House of Representatives had approved fifty million dollars in supplemental grants funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) as part of the $819 billion economic stimulus bill put forward by president Barack Obama.
Google announced last week that it has made available to users of advanced mobile phones an additional five hundred thousand titles from its Book Search digital library.
Karin Taylor, who served for over twenty years as executive director of the New York Center for Independent Publishing, was laid off last week, a move prompted by the deteriorating economy.
Cornell University Library announced on Tuesday that it will expand its ongoing partnership with Amazon by releasing tens of thousands of rare and, in many cases, out of print books as print-on-demand titles through the online retailer's Web site.
