While she’s left us, we will still get to enjoy one last book of poems by Wislawa Szymborska, due to be released later this year. (The Telegraph)

Friend to AuthorScoop, Gregg Hurwitz, is tapped to write BATMAN: THE DARK NIGHT for DC Comics. He’s a little bit thrilled. (DC Universe)

Six degrees of separation from your favorite book, courtesy of (GalleyCat)

The United States fell to 47th ranked in the world for freedom of the press. (The Atlantic)

Here’s some writing prompts from famous authors. (The Huffington Post)

Random House says it’ll raise the price on ebooks for lending, but it will allow the lending at least. (Publishers Weekly)

BookWeb has a look at what’s up and coming in Indie books. (bookweb)

First it was books, now it’s printed magazines that electronic reading is squishing. (The Telegraph)

“On this day in 1931, the Arkansas state legislature passed a motion to pray for the soul of H. L. Mencken. One of Mencken’s Laws was ‘Nature abhors a moron,’ and one of his favorite pastimes was to attack the South for being especially ruled by the ‘booboisie’; upon finding itself elevated to ‘the apex of moronia,’ Arkansas had apparently had enough…” (Today In Literature)

Wanna be a journalist? Yeah, there’s an app for that. Rawporter looks to make the man-on-the-street a trusted source for news. (ReadWriteWeb.com)

And if you need an app for inspiration for your fiction, there’s THE ARTIST’S WAY for smartphones as well. (GalleyCat)

Michael Chabon is the first announced speaker for this year’s Book Expo America. Watch the chart fill in at (BookExpoAmerica.com)

Barnes & Noble says they won’t sell Amazon-published books. (The New York Times)

Have a look at the 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World. (flavorwire)

Book blurbs: the good, the bad, and the ugly truth of it. (The Millions)

Fourteen year old, Clare Kocher, is perched atop an online writing contest for Harper Collins subsidiary, InkPop. (triblocal.com)

Nobel Prize-winning poet, Wislawa Szymborska, dies at age 88. RIP. (The Telegraph)

American philosopher and Freud-jouster, Frank Cioffi, dies at age 83. (The New York Times)

“On this day in 1970 Bertrand Russell died, aged ninety-seven. Like Henri Bergson before him, Russell won his 1950 Nobel Prize in literature without ever having published any. In presenting the award, the most that the Swedish Academy could offer to justify their selection of a mathematician-philosopher-social activist was the view that Russell often wrote as ‘the outspoken hero in a Shaw comedy’ talked, and that his commitment to ‘rationality and humanity’ was ‘in the spirit of Nobel’s intention.’…) (Today in Literature)

125 brand-name authors vote in the Greatest Books of All Time. (The Atlantic)

McGraw-Hill seems to be looking to sell, rather than branch off, its educational endeavors. (Financial Times)

The publisher of Bernard Schlink’s, THE READER, is in a clash over profits from The Weinstein Company’s film adaptation of it. (Deadline.com)

Edinburgh’s International Book Festival - refreshingly - wants authors, not celebrities, for its headline events. (The Guardian)

The National Times makes a case for why teens should read their porn, not watch it. (The Age)

Books bring nations together: Taiwan and China make cooperative noises over their ties in literature. (Focus Taiwan)

If you don’t like Apples terms, don’t use iAuthor, simple as that says (ZDnet.com)

Hank Haney wishes Tiger would read, THE BIG MISS: MY YEARS COACHING TIGER WOODS, before he gets upset about it. (USA Today)

Bangladeshi author, Taslima Nasreen’s, book, NIRBASAN, sparks a controversy at the Kolkata International Book Fair. (TheHindu.com)

Editor, Sam Vaughan, dies at age 83. RIP (the-leader.com)

“On this day in 1814 Lord Byron’s ‘The Corsair’ was published, selling out its entire first run of 10,000 copies. The poem was one of a handful of melodramatic verse-tales written by Byron between 1812-16, a period in which he was at the height of poetic fame in England…” (Today In Literature)

Sir Geoffrey Hill chews on Britain’s Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. (The Telegraph)

And Geoff Dyer runs Julian Barnes through with a blunt instrument. (Bryan Appleyard)

A diagramming of the struggle a self-published authors face over being taken seriously. (The Huffington Post)

Salon looks at moralizing and point-making in fiction. (Salon Magazine)

McGraw-Hill and its tentacles release last year’s earnings numbers. (Yahoo Finance)

The Scotsman interviews John Brockman on the development of electronic reading. (The Scotsman)

A look at the life and opinions of Adam Phillips. (Bookslut)

On the street where he lived: Dr. Seuss’ legacy from the starting point. (The New York Times)

Occupy Wall Street gets books to gutted Tucson library. (GalleyCat)

“On this day in 1948, J. D. Salinger’s ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ was published in the New Yorker; in the same magazine, on the same day in 1953, Salinger’s ‘Teddy’ also appeared. These are the first and last selections in Nine Stories (1953), Salinger’s only collection apart from various bootlegged editions of the other, forty-odd stories…” (Today In Literature)

The deadline for contributions to World Book Night 2012 is nigh. Like really, freakin’ nigh. Like day after tomorrow nigh. (a-littlebird.com)

Stieg Larsson and his dragon-tattooed girl set them rolling, but Quercus Publishing is still the object in motion. (plus-sx.com)

Jonathan Franzen hates ereaders and ebooks. Some people think he’s dead wrong. (The Telegraph)

And The Atlantic takes it a step further and upwards for electronic reading - into The Cloud as is were. (The Atlantic)

The Guardian muses on a little trimming in the fat-classics department. (The Guardian)

What if there were no Barnes & Noble? (The New York Times)

Preview what’s on tap for March’s meeting of The Association of American Publishers. (publishers.org)

Cory Doctorow dishes on the problem on DRM shackles in electronic publishing. (Publishers Weekly)

NYU shares what books it’s most anticipating in 2012. (NYULOCAL)

Author Alain de Botton champions atheist churches. (The Telegraph)

“On this day in 1933 Ezra Pound met with Benito Mussolini. This was a brief, one-time talk, but it would bring out the worst in Pound’s personality and lead to personal disaster; it would also inspire some of the best of modern poetry….” (Today In Literature)

February will be the launch-pad calendar page for The Month of Letters and a push to revive the art of letter writing. (GalleyCat)

Author, Alec Wilkinson, has a chat with Amazon about his new book, THE ICE BALLOON. (omnivoracious.com)

John Lanchester chews on why John Updike might be too good a writer. (London Review of Books)

Some clown hollowed out a bunch of books and put 36 pounds of cocaine where the words should have been. (DNAinfo.com)

The NY Times profiles poet, John Galassi. (The New York Times)

A year in the life of House of Anansi Press. (The National Post)

Edward St. Aubyn’s congenital silver spoon stirs his imagination and typing fingers to skewer the upper class. (Slate)

Q & A with Walter Mosley in… (The Chicago Sun Times)

“On this day in 1728 John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera opened in London. Its satire and singability made it a first-run sell-out, a cultural craze across England, the most produced play of the 18th century, and the original ‘ballad opera,’ first in the Gilbert and Sullivan line. Within the first week one London paper was reporting ‘a very general Applause, insomuch that the Waggs say it hath made Rich [the theater manager] very Gay, and probably will make Gay very Rich.’…” (Today In Literature)

From the Odd Files: Someone pretended to be Cormac McCarthy on Twitter. (GalleyCat)

Bloomsbury set to launch new imprint. (The Bookseller)

Henry Miller’s, TROPIC OF CANCER, is a hot topic at the NYTimes podcast feature. (The New York Times)

COMANDO: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOHNNY RAMONE is set to hit the shelves in April. (January Magazine)

We had naked librarians for charity. Now it’s naked poets. (The Huffington Post)

B&N’s Nook to cross The Pond to Waterstones. (CrainsNewYork)

Tick off the President, hit the the bestseller lists. Ask Jan Brewer how. (Politico)

A reflection on the impact of Gertrude Stein at (The New York Times)

“On this day in 1873 Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette) was born outside Paris. Even given her mythologizing, and her intentional blurring of the lines in her autobiographical fiction, Colette’s full and sensational life made her one of the most popular writers and personalities in the first half of the twentieth century. She wrote over fifty books, and is credited and blamed with much…” (Today In Literature)

Will Maurice Sendak save us from children’s books by Stephen Colbert? Tune in to find out. (GalleyCat)

Caldecott and Newbery winners tell us what it’s like to answer the phone and get the big news. (Publishers Weekly)

The state of poetry in China gives rise to a cause to nurture it. (ChinaDaily.com)

Random House UK editor, Rebecca Carter, switches tracks and becomes a literary agent. (Publishing Perspectives)

Publishing Trends recaps this year’s Digital Book World events. (publishingtrends.com)

The London Book Review posts a a poem about Sherlock Holmes. (lrb)

Buy a good review? Say it isn’t so. (The New York Times)

How Chris Evans learned to love books. (The Telegraph)

The Museum of Modern Art in New York hosts a new exhibit devoted to print works. (The Los Angeles Times)

Simon Garfield rates the fonts. (fastcodesign.com)

“On this day in 1722 Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders was published. Defoe’s title page is one of literature’s longest come-hithers, and casts a wide net: ‘The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c who was born at Newgate, and during a Life of continued Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five time a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew rich, liv’d Honest, and died a Penitent.’…” (Today In Literature)

Vladimir Putin compiles a 100 book to-be-read stack for Russian students. (The Guardian)

“There were more books published this week than there were in all of 1950.” Wow. (GalleyCat)

You’ll look silly if you confuse Shakespeare with The Telegraph’s chief book reviewer. (The Telegraph)

New York City’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has his reading tastes reviewed. (The New York Times)

A closer look as to why Andrew Miller’s, PURE, was awarded the Costa Prize. (The Telegraph)

If Scotland leaves, it’s taking its literature with it. (The Guardian)

Sesame Street joins forces with Random House to make ebooks for early readers. (DigitalBookWorld.com)

The Indian media weighs in on the Salman Rushdie mess in Jaipur. (The Wall Street Journal)

Mid-grade author, Peter Johnson, chats with Kirkus. (Kirkus Reviews)

Here’s a peek at the mansions of fifteen famous writers. (flavorwire)

A writer’s research leaves him scalded by the state of human trafficking. (The Huffington Post)

Apps and the publishing industry, a love/hate relationship. (The Bookseller)

“On this day in 1788 Captain Arthur Phillip brought the first British convict ships to anchor in Botany Bay, Australia. Over the next eighty years 825 such ships would bring 160,000 men and women to serve their “transportation” sentence — seven years for most, fourteen or life for some, no time at all for the significant number unable to survive the eight-month voyage. Captain Phillip went on to become the first Governor of Australia, and today became Australia Day…” (Today In Literature)

Andrew Miller takes the Costa Award for his novel, PURE. (The Guardian)

… and it was a wrangle amongst the judges, too. Here are the top five literary prize battles, according to (The Telegraph)

For all it’s worth, Washington, DC is (once again) the most literate city in the US. (USA Today)

… and in the city, a famous bookstore, Politics & Prose, sets up a business model and cultivates a culture that seems to work, even in this economy. (The Atlantic)

Hey! They get their ideas from somewhere, you know. 11 Academy Award nominees are novel adaptations. (The Huffington Post)

Here’s a list of good books to watch for, coming this year from Down Under. (Library journal)

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt joins hands with The Devil. Wait. That’s not right. It’s just Amazon. (GalleyCat)

A turkey, not metaphorical, but flapping and gobbling, breaks into a South Dakota library. (The Huffington Post)

Author, Charla Krupp, dies at age 58. RIP. (The New York Daily News)

“On this day in 1759 Robert Burns was born in Alloway, Scotland, and on this night lovers of Burns or Scotland or conviviality will gather around the world to celebrate the fact. Burns was elevated to national hero in his lifetime and cult figure soon afterwards, the first Burns Night celebration occurring almost immediately upon his death. This is due partly to the poetry and partly to the legendary details of the ploughman-poet life — his years as a poor tenant farmer; his enthusiasm for women (fifteen children, six born out of wedlock)…” (Today In Literature)

There are the words, then there are how the words look. Here’s a peek inside the sketchbooks of typeface designers. (brainpickings.org)

The Chicago Tribune unveils its new Sunday book section, a premium subscription addition planned for test roll out this Sunday. (The Chicago Tribune)

A tightrope walk, a diplomacy gauntlet, a teasing out of tangles - an examination of the subtleties of poetry editing. (The Telegraph)

Recap of the Caldecott and Newbery awards presentations. (The Los Angeles Times)

Oh dear. Rehabilitated? John Hinckley, Jr. hovers at a shelf of books on assassinations at Barnes & Noble. (The Washington Post)

Now Salman Rushdie can’t even phone it in to the Jaipur Literary Festival. Or video-call it, as it were. (The Times of India)

The shortlist is up for The British Science Fiction Awards. (The Guardian)

A love advice Twitter-spree from Lemony Snicket should be good fun. (The Huffington Post)

A list of bestsellers that a lot of readers seem to hate is on tap at (GalleyCat)

The ebook revolution drifts Down Under. (smartoffice.com)

“On this day in 1670 English playwright William Congreve was born. His ‘comedy of manners’ toasted and tilted at the ‘gala day of wit and pleasure’ enjoyed by those who lived in the inner circles of Restoration power, or wished they did. His characters live the court-life fast and loose, and always rise to their names: Fondlewife, Maskwell, Wishfort, Witwoud…” (Today In Literature)

Author, Kong Yalei, celebrates the Chinese New Year with a wonderful essay on reading. (Granta)

Big day for children’s literature: Caldecott and Newbery Prizes awarded today! (The New York Times)

The bestseller lists, explained. (The Sacramento Bee)

The New Republic dissects the shade and nuance of journalistic language. (The New Republic)

Those sexy Canadians and their sexy literature. ‘Tis true. Check it out. (January Magazine)

Stephen King uses all his fingers to count up his favorite books. But, with as much as he reads, I’ll bet he wished he had a lot more hands. (The Christian Science Monitor)

The San Fransisco Chronicle lets the first lines of a few novels speak for themselves. (SFGate.com)

Barack Obama’s reading habits are scrutinized across The Pond. (The Telegraph)

If we write it, they will come: American authors and their sports novels. (Slate)

NPR chews on “predatory” Amazon. (NPR)

Simon Doonan is a little bit crazy, but he’s got a funny book and he’ll tell you how to get your picture taken flatteringly. (USA Today)

“On this day in 1930 Derek Walcott was born on St. Lucia. Walcott’s two-dozen collections of poems and plays — one recent work, Tiepolo’s Hound, widens the range by including his paintings — earned the 1992 Nobel…” (Today In Literature)

The National Book Critics Circle posts their list of finalists for its 2011 honors. (bookcritics.org)

The plot thickens: Salman Rushdie accuses the police of inventing the threats against him to keep him from the Jaipur Literary Festival. (The Daily Beast)

A look at the pending Costa Awards and its current shortlist via (The Guardian)

By today’s standard, Robert Burns might have been a terrorist. (The Scotsman)

Somebody’s buying a lot of ebooks, but nearly a quarter of the Christmas Kindle-gifted say they haven’t turned the thing on yet. (pocket-lint.com)

3M holds court at The American Library Association’s Mid-Winter event to showcase its Cloud Library for ebooks. (Yahoo Business)

While the ALA powers schedule a session with half of The Big Six to chew through more tangles in ebook lending policy. (Library Journal)

The Writers Guild is set to honor achievement in video game writing. (GalleyCat)

Richard Ketchum, author and editor, dead at 89. RIP. (The New York Times)

“On this day, fifteen years apart, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) premiered. Although both were poorly reviewed to start, The Crucible would win a Tony and Our Town a Pulitzer; and both would become not only classics of American theater, but classic, opposite statements on the idea of community living…” (Today In Literature)

Jennifer Egan is the poster child for the upside of failure. (CNN)

January Magazine gets a kick out of the New York Daily News’ headline on BELOVED banning. (January Magazine)

French publisher, Flammarion, may soon be up for sale, as RCS considers heaving ballast. (Bloomberg)

A first edition copy of Audubon’s, BIRDS OF AMERICA, stretches towards $8 million at auction. (nydailynews.com)

The New York Times hosts a book discussion podcast. (The New York Times)

The U.S. Naval Observatory donates a rare volume to Thomas Jefferson’s Library. (loc.gov)

New book explores how our attitudes towards sex and morality aren’t as new as we might think. (The Guardian)

Waterstones picks eleven authors to watch in 2012. (The Telegraph)

“On this day in 1950 George Orwell died, aged forty-six. Whatever Orwell achieved in his last years seems over-balanced by what he suffered. Against the acclaim earned by the two famous novels — Animal Farm in 1945 and 1984 just seven months before Orwell died — stands a withering series of personal challenges…” (Today In Literature)

51 years ago today, Robert Frost didn’t read the poem he’d written for JFK’s inauguration. (Library of Congress)

SOPA & PIPA on hold while Congress mulls. And hopefully reads and listens, too. (The Atlantic)

Salman Rushie issues a statement regarding the opposition to his appearance in Jaipur. (The New York Times)

Do you want to pad your to-be-read list with unputdownable books? Come see what books readers say they devoured in one day. (GalleyCat)

The American Library Association’s midwinter event kicks off in Dallas. (Publishers Weekly)

Harvard’s library staff don’t know which way the wind’s blowing over their employment status. (LibraryJournal)

Jason Boog hosts a discussion with Aaron Shapiro on book promotion. (MediaBistro)

It’s nice to have writer friends. Richard Russo pings his friends on their opinion of Amazon’s predatory campaigns. (The New York Times)

And here’s a closer look at the growing trend of enhanced ebooks. (The Wall Street Journal)

“This is the Eve of St. Agnes, on which young virgins obedient to various bedtime rituals — having eaten only a salt-filled egg, or having put sprigs of thyme and rosemary in their shoes-are granted a vision of their future lovers. Agnes is the patron saint of virgins, martyred at the age of twelve (ca. 305) for choosing to die rather than become the wife of a Roman prefect. In Keats’s famous “The Eve of St. Agnes,” Madeline retires dressed in white, pledged to look only heavenward for her vision of the forbidden Porphyro; this allows Porphyro, who has hidden himself in her bedroom closet, to have full view of her…” (Today In Literature)

If you’re a man, being a novelist is hard. Have a look at a different take on gender-inequality in the publishing world. (Salon)

The Horror Writers Association nominates a list for consideration for the Bram Stoker Vampire Novel of the Century Award. (GalleyCat)

Arthur Phillips buys a writing desk. (But he was doing pretty well without one.) (The New York Times)

The UK’s Pearson is cautiously optimistic for 2012 sales. (The Guardian)

Jill Biden’s tribute to the troops to be published by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. (YahooNews)

Jaipur’s Literary Festival has more security tangles than just Salman Rushdie. (The Los Angeles)

Simon Callow earns a standing ovation for reading Seamus Heaney’s poem, THE PENINSULA. (The Telegraph)

Author, Brad Taylor, puts names to crime fiction cliche pains. (The Huffington Post)

Dicken’s London viewed through the lens. (The Telegraph)

Occupy Las Cruces causes a small ruckus outside a New Mexico Barnes & Noble. (Las Cruces Sun-News)

Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, dies at age 64. RIP. (Gutenberg.org)

“On this day in 1946 Julian Barnes was born. When in his mid-thirties Barnes was featured in Granta magazine’s ‘Best of Young British Fiction’ issue. If this did not exactly launch his career (Barnes protests the claim), it certainly put him in good company - Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift and others. The prize-winning Flaubert’s Parrot was published the next year (1984)…” (Today In Literature)

The safeguarding of intellectual property and the enforcement of copyright protections is important. People in the publishing world know this better than most. But the ham-fisted provisions of the Stop Online Piracy Act and its cousin, the Protect IP Act, are igniting long-reaching concerns in many technology experts and everyday users.

That’s why the internet might look all jacked-up today.

Read up on it.

Don’t let the black flag warning fool ya: the protest against SOPA and PIPA explained. (AbsoluteWrite.com)

… and here’s more info and a way to join the protest. (sopastrike.com)

Why creativity isn’t really a group sport. (The New York Times)

Poetry readers have the power to buoy independent bookstores. Here’s how. (GalleyCat)

More good news regarding people being expressing their interest in ebooks - with their wallets. (sourcebooks.com)

Cormac McCarthy pops up with a script, not a novel. (deadline.com)

Not sure that the man himself would approve, but Salon looks at what J.D. Salinger was working on when he died. (Salon)

“On this day in 1936 Rudyard Kipling died at the age of seventy-one. Although one of England’s most popular writers at the turn of the century, and a Nobel winner in 1907, by the time of his death Kipling was not merely forgotten but scorned and cartooned. To the intellectuals and political Left he was a dinosaur of Empire, a jingoist of pith-helmet patriotism and white-man’s-burden racism…” (Today In Literature)

John Burnside has won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Here’s a couple of poems to show us why. (London Review of Books)

Atlantic Books takes a deep breath and pushes back the date on Christopher Hitchens’ memoir, MORTALITY. All the better to do it justice. (The Bookseller)

Here’s a look at some science books to keey an eye out for this year. (NewScientist.com)

The Library of Congress celebrates Benjamin Franklin’s birthday. (loc.gov)

Patricia Cohen’s new book contemplates the cultural fiction of the concept of “middle age”. (The Huffington Post)

The New York Observer has a look at editor Amy Einhorn’s Midas touch. (observer.com)

The editor blogs at Writers Digest unveil their new look. Nice! (WritersDigest.com)

Jim Henson has been gone from us for twenty years, but one of his undeveloped screenplays will soon be a new graphic novel. (The Wall Street Journal)

McSweeney’s has a chat with author, John Horgan, on his latest, THE END OF WAR. (McSweeney’s)

Active fiction isthe next big thing, presumably. (MarketWatch.com)

“On this day in 1775, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals premiered. This was Sheridan’s first play; below is the first entrance and first malapropism of his most famous character, at this point walking in on and then all over niece Lydia’s choice in books and beaus…” (Today In Literature)

Ah, the internet. Writers and reviewers in instant electronic proximity. What could go wrong? (The Guardian)

Bloomsbury had a decent return on 2011, and a 38% increase in ebook sales didn’t hurt. (Bloomsbury)

Author, Zadie Smith, lends a writer’s eye to the fact and soul of the prosperity gap between nations. (Guernica Magazine)

The New Yorker profiles author, Roberto Bolaño. (The New Yorker)

A look back on the life and career of Edith Wharton. (The Telegraph)

Library Journal points readers to a few books on North Korea. (Library Journal)

James Gregor remembers his time in the employ of George Whitman at his fabulous and famous Paris bookstore, Shakespeare and Company. (The Millions)

Lionsgate doesn’t see an end to the TWILIGHT books as any reason to stop make Twilight films. (The Guardian)

Jerome Rubin, who predicted ebooks back in 1989, dies at age 86. RIP. (The Los Angeles Times)

“On this day in 1874, Robert Service — the Kipling of Canada” — was born in Preston, England. When he was twenty-one, Service quit his bank job in Glasgow and hit out for Canada, serious enough about fulfilling his dream of becoming a cowboy that he brought his Buffalo Bill outfit along with him. Ten years later he was back working in a bank…” (Today In Literature)

In 1911, ‘The Ladies’ Home Journal’ cast its imagination a hundred years into the future, otherwise known as last year. (Buzzfeed)

So a few days ago, we found that college students prefer paper books, but today it’s that little kids like digital ones. Shift ahoy! (GalleyCat)

Take cover or strap on your battle gear. Apple and Amazon go to war this coming week. (Cult of Mac)

The Wall Street Journal chats with sci-fi great, William Gibson. (The Wall Street Journal)

Independent bookstores get some words of encouragement in the struggle against online retailers from the Poetry Foundation. (The Huffington Post)

And GalleyCat chimes in with a guide to buying ebooks from independent bookstores. (GalleyCat)

GOOSEBUMPS script to be written by Darren Lemke of, JACK THE GIANT KILLER fame. (perezhilton)

“On this day in 1891 the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam was born. While by no means the only writer driven to death by Stalin’s Reign of Terror, Mandelstam has become, for many, the symbol of all those so destroyed. This is partly due to his poetry — most rank him among the best Russian poets, some among the best of all 20th century poets…” (Today In Literature)