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:
After a lengthy legal battle, the National Library of Israel has acquired a rare collection of Franz Kafka’s manuscripts. The library will eventually make the collection available online. (Guardian)
Could robots pass a poetic Turing Test? Dartmouth College’s Neukom Institute for Computational Science is sponsoring three artificial intelligence contests to find algorithms for “human quality” fiction and poetry. The institute hopes the contests will “inspire artificial intelligence researchers to take on that challenge and create another dimension of AI—creative intelligence.” (Fortune)
E-book subscription service Scribd is pulling thousands of romance titles from its catalogue. Scribd, whose business model requires payment to publishers for every title read, reports that it has become too expensive to keep up with the number of readers who download romance e-books. (NiemanLab.org)
Current Sears president and CEO Ron Boire has been appointed the new CEO of Barnes & Noble, Inc., as well as the new head of Barnes & Noble’s retail bookstore group. Boire will take over duties when the Barnes & Noble Education division spinoff is completed later this summer. Boire will replace current CEO Mike Huseby, who is set to become the company’s executive chairman. (Publishers Weekly)
Mexican publishing house Mexico City Lit has released Poets for Ayotzinapa, a free digital poetry anthology in memory of the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College students who disappeared last September. (Hyperallergic)
A group art exhibit currently on display at the Pace Gallery in New York City centers on Edgar Allan Poe’s 1848 treatise on the origins of the universe, Eureka: A Prose Poem. (Paris Review)
All the Light We Cannot See author Anthony Doerr discusses his reading habits and favorite authors: “I’ll read anything Anne Carson writes, anything J. M. Coetzee writes, and anything Cormac McCarthy writes. I’ll drop whatever I’m doing to read a new Mary Ruefle essay.” (New York Times)
