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:
A new book—Brad Stone’s The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon—reports that Amazon’s stance toward small publishers “was called the Gazelle Project after Mr. Bezos said Amazon ‘should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.’” (Shelf Awareness)
Meanwhile, Hector Tobar looks at how Amazon and other online booksellers are reacting to compaints over pornographic content in self-published e-books. (Los Angeles Times)
And at a Barnes & Noble in California, firefighters helped a woman deliver a baby. (Huffington Post)
“When my father was old and I was still young, I came into some money. Though it was money ‘earned’ for work done, it seemed, both to my father and me, no different than a win on the lottery.” Novelist Zadie Smith writes of taking her father to France and Italy after the publication of her first novel White Teeth. (New York Review of Books)
A new book, Evelyn Barish’s The Double Life of Paul de Man reveals that the renowned literary theorist and Yale professor was a convicted criminal. (Chronicle of Higher Education)
The second volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography is out. (PBS)
If you haven’t seen enough of Mr. Clemens, Open Culture found an image of Mark Twain with Nikola Tesla.
