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:
Misha Defonseca, a Belgian memoirist living in Massachusetts, has been ordered to pay $22.5 million to her publisher for falsifying the events in her memoir [2], Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years. In the book, the author falsely claimed Jewish heritage, and that she’d killed a Nazi soldier and lived with wolves after her parents were taken to a concentration camp. (International Business Times)
The regional council of Calabria, a region in southern Italy, has voted to cut three days of jail time for each book that a prisoner reads [3]. (Independent)
The school board of Wilson County, Tennessee, located just outside of Nashville, has removed British author Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time [4] from its curriculum due to the book's use of profanity. (Tennessean)
Paste magazine explores the last thirteen feminist bookstores left [5] in the United States and Canada.
Meanwhile, the New York Times examines the many iconic, and now shuttered, bookstores of New York City’s past [6].
Phoebe Stone, the daughter of poet Ruth Stone, remembers her mother’s passion for lilacs and gardening [7] at her home in Goshen, Vermont, which is scheduled to open this year as a center for writers and artists [8]. (Burlington Free Press)
Beth Ann Fennelly contributes her personal credo celebrating curiosity, ecstasy, activity, and hedonism [9] to the Kenyon Review.
Vulture examines Benjamin Kunkel’s journey from novelist to writer of Marxist essays [10].