With book sales down 11.7 per cent, the Borders Book Group has hired a new C.E.O., Ron Marshall, who oversaw the turn-around of the grocery-store chain Pathmark. Meanwhile, the billionaire Ron Burkle has purchased an 8.3 per-cent stake in Barnes & Noble Inc., claiming that the company is undervalued.
As part of its effort to join the European Union, Turkey has restored citizenship to one of its most famous and beloved poets, Nazim Hikmet, whom the state had imprisoned and branded a traitor for his Communist views; he died in exile, in 1963.
The award-winning Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, whose life has been threatened by Islamist extremists, has found refuge in Paris, where she will live in an artist’s studio paid for by the city.
In honor of the bicentennial of Louis Braille’s birth, the writer Ian Rankin, whose son is blind, has launched a campaign to increase the availability of books in Braille, large print, and audio formats.
Lake Superior State University, in Michigan, has posted its 2009 List of Banished Words, including “iconic,” “game changer,” and “not so much.”
Launched by Penguin last year in Australia, New Zealand, and India, Popular Penguins, a low-budget series of fiction and nonfiction titles published in paperback with nostalgic orange-and-cream covers, have proven so successful that a plan is in the works to expand to more markets.
January is turning out to be a big month for children’s books, including two more young-adult novels about vampires.
The Reverend Ed Dobson, who struggled to eat, pray, and talk like Jesus for an entire year, has reached the conclusion that “if you get serious about the Bible, it will really mess you up.”
Harper Perennial has published an anthology of stories inspired by the songs of Sonic Youth.
At the end of the month, the London specialty bookstore Murder One will close.
The 2008 Costa Book Award winners include the ninety-one-year-old memoirist Diana Athill.
The Austrian poet and playwright Gert Jonke has died, at the age of sixty-two.
