Penguin to Publish Book on Missing Malaysian Airlines Plane, California Bookstore Day, and More

by
Staff
5.5.14

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:

Penguin Books plans to publish a book by aviation writer Christine Negroni regarding the still-missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 titled Crashed: What the World’s Most Mysterious Airplane Disasters Teach Us About Design, Technology, and Human Performance. (GalleyCat)

California Bookstore Day was celebrated over the weekend, resulting in increased sales for many of the state’s independent booksellers. (Shelf Awareness)

To mark its eightieth anniversary this year, the Academy of American Poets has launched a new website, which features a newly reinvented font designed speficially for poets.

Citizens Defending Libraries, a political action group protesting the New York Public Library’s Central Library Plan, has filed a lawsuit with the state’s supreme court. The suit claims that former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg did not have time to adequately assess the environmental impact of the plan to dramatically renovate the historic Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. (Wall Street Journal)

After the New Yorker excerpted Junot Díaz’s essay regarding the lack of diversity in MFA programs, Díaz’s syllabus, which includes work by many writers of color, has been posted at Salon

South African poet Morakabe Raks Seakhoa was barred from entering the United States to participate in a panel discussion at Brown University over the weekend. Seakhoa was imprisoned by the Apartheid-era government for his political activism. (Independent Online)

Novelist Thomas Mallon and critic Dana Stevens discuss the difficulty of representing writing in film. (New York Times)

Blogger Sarah Wendell points out a rather humorous glitch in optical character recognition software, which, among other things, replaces “arms” with “anus” in older works when the text is converted to e-book format. (Guardian)