Authors Guild Calls for Collective Licensing Agreement, Ted Cruz’s Memoir, and More

by
Staff
4.4.14

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:

Authors Guild general counsel Jan Constantine testified before Congress this week, asking a House judiciary committee to create an organization to help guarantee payment to authors when books are scanned and digitized by Google and other companies. (Publishers Weekly)

Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz has been given close to $1.5 million as an advance to write his political memoir for HarperCollins. (Christian Science Monitor)

Former Amazon editor and eight-time Jeopardy! champion Tom Nissley has purchased Santoro’s Books in Seattle; Nissley has been recommending books for ten years via online blogs, and his first book, A Reader’s Book of Days, which was published by Norton last year, features stories about the lives of well-known authors for each day of the year. (Shelf Awareness)

In collaboration with the organization Literature Across Frontiers, Britain’s Comma Press has created the Gimbal app, which allows fans of short fiction to read or listen to one of several short pieces while an interactive map points out important landmarks or locations relevant to the piece. (Skinny)

Meanwhile, eyeglass designer and retailer Warby Parker has created a map of New York City’s Upper East Side that showcases the neighborhood’s presence in literature by Joan Didion, Jonathan Lethem, and E. B. White, among others. (GalleyCat)

NPR talks to George Prochnik, biographer of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, whose works inspired director Wes Anderson’s latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Historian James Secord writes about the nineteenth century divergence between scientific and literary writing spurred by essayist Thomas De Quincey. (Oxford University Press)

Flavorwire lists the fifty best novels to come out of the American South.