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:
In book-selling news: paidContent takes a close look at top-ranked titles and compares their print to e-book sales; meanwhile, eBookNewser reports genre writer and DIY advocate J.A. Konrath announced his e-books alone garnered $100,000 in three weeks; and according to Shelf Awareness, bookstore sales fell this past November compared to 2010.
If you've excitedly welcomed the recent return of PBS series Downton Abbey, GalleyCat offers a poetry reading list to supplement your viewing, including work by Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, and Siegfried Sassoon.
Melville House ponders why some book-to-film adaptations work, and others clearly don't.
English professor Matthew Kirschenbaum is researching the literary history of word processing, and reports many writers are in the running to be remembered as the first to compose text on a computer. (New York Times)
Two years after the literary festival Etonnants Voyageurs Haiti was cancelled due to 2010's devastating earthquake, the festival has renewed and is scheduled for the first four days of February 2012. (Publishing Perspectives)
The annual celebration of poet William Stafford's birth will take place next week in Portland, Oregon. Stafford was United States Poet Laureate in 1970, as well as Oregon's poet laureate for thirteen years. He died in 1993. (Mail Tribune)
NPR previews the poetry of 2012, including new titles by Lucille Clifton, Lucia Perillo, D.A. Powell, and James Tate.
The Washington Post offers a photo essay on the state of American poetry, and writes, "To say that poetry no longer matters is a gross misreading of the facts."
The New York Times reviews the newly released memoir by Ed Sanders, An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the ____ You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side. In the 1960s, Sanders was the publisher of a "hand-printed, hand-stapled, gleefully profane literary magazine" that included the work of Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, and Frank O’Hara.
