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A Cornish beach thought to have been the inspiration behind Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse sold at auction yesterday for £80,000 (about $130,000). The seventy-six acres of Upton Towans beach in Gwithian went to an unnamed buyer from London, who trumped competing bids from as far afield as Russia and the United States.
Cultural theorist Joshua Glenn and journalist Rob Walker last week kicked off an experiment that will test the literary significance of otherwise useless objects. As curators of the "Significant Objects" project, the duo are pairing writers with knickknacks picked up for a pittance at thrift stores and flea markets, and asking the scribes to feature the objects in short works of fiction.
Another reason to buy it for the articles: Playboy has scored the first serial rights to an unfinished novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The magazine’s December issue will feature a five-thousand-word excerpt from The Original of Laura, which was left in fragmentary form when the author died in 1977.
Graywolf Press has announced plans to move its offices across the Mississippi River from St. Paul to Minneapolis in about two months’ time. The nonprofit publisher will leave the building it has occupied since 1990 to take up new digs in the Traffic Zone Visual Arts Center, located in the city’s trendy Warehouse district.
A judge in London yesterday sentenced three Muslim men to four-and-a-half years in prison for an arson attack against the publisher of a novel about one of Muhammad’s wives. In September 2008, the trio set fire to the home of Martin Rynja just days before his company, Gibson Square, was due to publish The Jewel of Medina by American author Sherry Jones.
For those unaccustomed to absorbing more than 140 characters at a sitting, Penguin is set to release a volume that pares classic books down to a series of tweet-sized chunks. Twitterature, the brainchild of two University of Chicago freshmen, promises to deliver works by Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce, and J. K. Rowling in no more than twenty tweets apiece.
A federal judge in New York City last week issued a preliminary injunction barring the U.S. publication of what attorneys for J. D. Salinger are calling an unauthorized sequel to The Catcher in the Rye.
Editors at the independent poetry press Wave Books recently announced that they will host a three-day poetry event in Seattle at the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery. Slated to run from August 14 to 16, the festival will feature readings, film screenings, exhibitions, discounts on poetry books at fourteen local bookstores, and, according to the organizer’s Web site, wild blackberry picking.
Tennesseans are preparing to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of poet, writer, and critic James Agee. The Knoxville-born author is the subject of an upcoming art exhibition at the Nashville Public Library, and will also be feted with a three-day festival at the Knox County Library.
A group of writing instructors and students who over the years formed a ragtag band during late-night impromptu jam sessions at the Bennington Writing Seminars released their first CD earlier this year. Titled Let's Doghouse: A Tribute to Liam Rector, the compilation serves as a memorial to the founding director of the Writing Seminars, a poet, who passed away two years ago.
