Apple and Amazon Face Off, Picking the Best Nonfiction, and More

by
Evan Smith Rakoff
6.15.11

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:

Apple and Amazon face off over the Kindle in the App Store. (CNN)

Tomorrow is Bloomsday, the annual celebration of the life of James Joyce. Elizabeth Minkel provides a roundup of things Ulysses lovers can do to join in the fun, with events in New York (a pub crawl!) and others online. (New Yorker)

Johnny Temple's small indie press, Akashic Books, currently has the number one best-seller on Amazon, Go the F**k to Sleep, written by Adam Mansbach and illustrated by Ricardo Cortés. It's a hilarious send-up of bedtime stories, intended for exhausted parents. (You've likely been e-mailed the viral PDF copy or seen it posted on Facebook.) Today the audiobook, read by Samuel L. Jackson, is available for free at Audible.com.

After a "keen debate," the editors of the Guardian list the one hundred best nonfiction books of all time, and ask for readers to tell them what they missed.

In the aftermath of the City University of New York offering playwright Tony Kushner an honorary degree—then rescinding the offer, then reinstating it—Novelist Nathan Englander speaks with the outspoken Pulitzer Prize winner about his views on Israel.

Prosecutors seek to block jailed former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick from profiting from his upcoming memoir. (Detroit Free Press)

Laura Miller writes about a new electronic "Waste Land," specifically T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." (Salon)

Novelist Dani Shapiro discusses her use of Twitter and Freedom. No, not Jonathan Franzen's Freedom; this is software that allows writers to curb their Internet habit. (n+1)