DeLillo on the Shot Heard ’Round the World, Eugenides in Times Square, and More

by
Evan Smith Rakoff
10.4.11

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:

On day eighteen of an encampment in New York City's Zuccotti Park, aside from tarps and sleeping bags, the Occupy Wall Street protestors have set up a lending library. Books of poetry, such as Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass are among the shared books. (New Yorker)

Barnes & Noble's Nook e-reader is now on the shelves of the retail giant Target. (Forbes)

Book promotion for literary fiction has hit a new high-water mark—visitors to New York City's Times Square can now snap photographs under a giant billboard of The Marriage Plot author Jeffrey Eugenides. (Observer)

In other promotion news, this past summer, after receiving a publishing contract from Ballentine, Jenny Milchman took her family on a cross-country tour, visiting sixty bookstores. The first of two tours before her book comes out. (Shelf Awareness)

The Millions details why Philip Levine is the perfect United States poet laureate for our historical moment.

The coalmines underneath Centralia, Pennsylvania, have been on fire since 1962. Fueling many works of literature, the Paris Review explains why the abandoned town holds such a fascination for writers.

After losing funding for a sculpture park honoring Hans Christian Andersen, the sculptor Jens Galschiot intends to drown his statue of the Danish author in a harbor in Odense—the city where Andersen was born—and resurrect it on the author's birthday. (Guardian)

On the sixtieth anniversary of the "shot heard ’round the world"—meaning New York Giants outfielder Bobby Thomson's game-winning homerun at the Polo Grounds that took the National League pennant from the Brooklyn Dodgers—Grantland speaks with novelist Don DeLillo about his memories of that historic day.