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:
German publisher Droste announced this morning that fears of Islamist reprisals have led it to cancel the release of a murder-mystery in which a character makes potentially offensive remarks about the Koran (Reuters).
New York City’s Upper West Side will soon be home to the Frank McCourt High School of Writing Journalism and Literature, named in honor of the late Angela’s Ashes author, who spent twenty-seven years as a public school teacher (New York).
Although Amazon has kept publishers clammed up under non-disclosure agreements, word is spreading that the retailer plans to announce the long-anticipated U.K. launch of its Kindle reading device in time for the Frankfurt Book Fair this month (Bookseller).
Betting against the appeal of Kindles to kids, Disney Publishing is making its entire book catalogue—along with voice and video content—available on a new subscription-supported Web site (New York Times).
Far from the e-book hullabaloo, the New Mexico State Library quietly maintains the country’s last surviving state-run bookmobile program (Associated Press).
The Huffington Post books section has gone live, and with it has come the first selection in Arianna Huffington’s new book club: In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honoré (HarperOne, 2004).
Cry-baby or crybaby? The hyphen is becoming a casualty of Internet-era informality, according to the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which has dropped the punctuation mark from about 16,000 formerly hyphenated terms (Reuters).
After a naming contest wrapped up last week, Harvard’s new print-on-demand Espresso Book Machine has been christened Paige M. Gutenborg (Press Release). Meanwhile, a library at the university is drawing criticism for electing to put some of its more valuable holdings behind bars (Boston Globe).
Paul Auster, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, and a slew of other prominent authors have weighed in on the Roman Polanski controversy, adding their names to a petition in support of the recently arrested filmmaker (La Règle du jeu).
