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The hackers behind The Interview incident have elicited both anger and fear throughout the country. The PEN American Center has sent a letter addressed to the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Michael Lynton, to protest against this act of censorship. The organization has posted the full piece on its website.

Besides various PEN executives and trustees, several high profile writers have also signed this note. Some of the participants include PEN president emeritus Salman Rushdie, novelist Neil Gaiman, children’s books illustrator Jules Feiffer, poet John Ashbery, and playwright Tony Kushner. Here’s an excerpt:

“PEN is appalled at the intrusive, criminal and profoundly menacing reprisals and threats that Sony Pictures has endured as a result of producing and planning to distribute The Interview. PEN has long stood with writers and creators who have suffered assaults aimed to suppress the dissemination of their ideas. We believe firmly that violence is never justified as a reaction to speech, no matter how offensive that speech may be to some.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Ever since eBooks have come out, authors have been concerned about how their work is is represented in the digital format. This is an especially pertinent issue for poets, whose use of the line on the page is part of the work itself.

But as digital continues to evolve, eBook developers are better preserving line breaks and stanza spacing. Just ask John Ashbery. Just a few years back the poet demanded that four eBook collections of his poetry be pulled after the format mutilated the work. But the 87 year-old has not given up on the digital format and in conjunction with digital publishing house Open Road, has published 17 digital collections of his work. This time, the technology is much better than his first time out.  (more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

This year’s Brooklyn Book Festival brought more than three hundred writers to the literary borough.

Brooklyn Borough president and event founder Marty Markowitz boasted that it is now the third largest literary festival in the country.

Each year, the festival recognizes a literary figure whose work embodies the Brooklyn spirit with the Best of Brooklyn, Inc. award (BoBi). Two-time Newbery medalist Lois Lowry won the award this year.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Rummaging through some old poems
for ideas -- surely I must have had some
once? Some people have an idea a day,
others millions, still others are condemned
to spend their life inside an idea, like a
bubble chamber. And these are probably
the suspicious ones. Anyway, in poems
are no ideas. No ideas in things, either--
her name is Wichita.

--John Ashbery,
from "And the Stars Were Shining"