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:
Margaret Atwood plans to pen a work of fiction that will be locked away, unread, for the next one hundred years as part of the Future Library project, created this year by Scottish artist Katie Paterson. Every year until 2114, the Future Library trust—currently comprised of Paterson and literary experts—will invite a writer to contribute an unpublished text to the project. In 2114, the trust will publish all the texts on paper made from the one thousand trees Paterson planted in Norway this summer. (Guardian)
Meanwhile, at the Washington Post, Caitlin Dewey talks with computer scientist Kalev Leetaru about how he hopes to collect “all of the world’s out-of-copyright book images in this single massive gallery of our history,” with a software program that pulls images from the Internet Archive’s digitized books and uploads them to Flickr. As of now, he has extracted 2.6 million images from over five hundred years of books.
Authors Lee Goldberg and Joel Goldman have partnered with Amazon to launch Brash Books, a venture devoted to publishing both new and backlisted crime novels. Amazon will publish and help promote all of the house’s titles. (Publishers Weekly)
R&B artists Shawn Rivera and RoccStarr will release Caged Bird Songs, a hip-hop album with lyrics from Maya Angelou’s work, in November. Angelou recorded the album with them shortly before she passed away in May. (Huffington Post)
As part of a series of interviews with the industry professionals involved in publishing her debut novel, California, author Edan Lepucki talks with her publicists at Little, Brown about their day-to-day and how to build book buzz. (Millions)
Ryan Doherty, a former senior editor at Ballantine Bantam Dell, joins Sony Pictures Entertainment as its first vice president of literary development; Doherty will focus on optioning books for film and television. (Publishers Weekly)
In other book-to-film news, producer Juliet Blake has acquired the film rights for Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel, Hansel and Gretel, which will be published in October. (GalleyCat)
Flavorwire takes a look at the misguided book jacket redesigns of work by writers like David Mitchell, Emily Brontë, and Sylvia Plath.
