Author to Repay $22.5 Million for Falsified Memoir, Italian Inmates Cut Prison Time Through Reading, and More

by
Staff
5.12.14

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:

Misha Defonseca, a Belgian memoirist living in Massachusetts, has been ordered to pay $22.5 million to her publisher for falsifying the events in her memoir, Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years. In the book, the author falsely claimed Jewish heritage, and that she’d killed a Nazi soldier and lived with wolves after her parents were taken to a concentration camp. (International Business Times)

The regional council of Calabria, a region in southern Italy, has voted to cut three days of jail time for each book that a prisoner reads. (Independent)

The school board of Wilson County, Tennessee, located just outside of Nashville, has removed British author Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time from its curriculum due to the book's use of profanity. (Tennessean)

Paste magazine explores the last thirteen feminist bookstores left in the United States and Canada.

Meanwhile, the New York Times examines the many iconic, and now shuttered, bookstores of New York City’s past.

Phoebe Stone, the daughter of poet Ruth Stone, remembers her mother’s passion for lilacs and gardening at her home in Goshen, Vermont, which is scheduled to open this year as a center for writers and artists. (Burlington Free Press)

Beth Ann Fennelly contributes her personal credo celebrating curiosity, ecstasy, activity, and hedonism to the Kenyon Review.

Vulture examines Benjamin Kunkel’s journey from novelist to writer of Marxist essays.