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:
The Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow—more than a thousand protestors gathered in New York City’s Zuccotti Park this morning to protest the property owner’s plan to clean up the park, which was postponed. Protests have occurred in cities across the country, and more are planned in the coming days. A mass protest planned for Phoenix, Arizona, this Saturday, has as its spokesperson a twenty-eight-year-old spoken-word poet, Sevan Aydinian, who performs under the moniker Apollo Poetry. (Modern Times)
Books-a-Million joins Barnes & Noble in removing from their store shelves the one hundred DC Comics titles published exclusively as e-books on Amazon's Kindle Fire. (Publishers Weekly)
The American Booksellers Association reports that September's Banned Books Week was a success, with well over six hundred videos of citizens reading from their favorite banned books posted on YouTube. (Bookselling This Week)
Despite Ernest Hemingway's insistence on not making his letters available to the reading public, the first of what will eventually be sixteen volumes of the influential author's correspondence has been published, The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 1, 1907–1922. "My principal motive for wanting it to happen was that I think it gives a much better picture of Hemingway's life than any of his biographers to date," says Patrick Hemingway. Speaking of his father, he adds, "Hemingway was not a tragic figure. He had the misfortune to have mental troubles in old age. Up until that, he was a rather lighthearted and humorous person." (Chronicle of Higher Education)
With Britpop musician Jarvis Cocker appointed editor-at-large at Faber & Faber, the success of Keith Richards's autobiography Life, and a slew of other rock stars with books in the works, the Telegraph asks, "Literature: is it the new rock and roll?"
In a review of MacArthur fellow Colson Whitehead's new zombie-riddled novel, Zone One—due out next week, yet already in its third printing—the Guardian debates what makes a book either literary or genre fiction. "Not every detective or fantasy novel is brilliantly written, no, but some certainly are. And not every literary novel disappears up its own arse, but oh, yes, some definitely do."
If you're near Los Angeles on Halloween Eve, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is screening three films starring Vincent Price, adapted from the writing of Edgar Allen Poe. The free, daylong film festival is being presented as part of the museum's Tim Burton exhibition. (Los Angeles Times)
Do not ask Cary Tennis to edit your book for free. (Salon)
