Cooler but still well above normal this week

MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all. 

Turn Up Your Support

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Just over two years into a rocky partnership, Microsoft and Barnes & Noble have decided to call it quits. The mega-bookseller announced Thursday that it plans to buy out Microsoft's stake in its albatross of an e-reader, the Nook.

 the Nook in 2012, investing $300 million to earn a share of about 17 percent in its ownership. In the time since, hopes for the deal's prospects have faded. A low point came with news of last year's holiday sales, which showed Barnes & Noble's Nook division plummeting 60.5 percent from the year before,

. In June of this year, the bookseller announced a plan to 

 its Nook unit into a separate company sometime next year — news that was greeted with cheers from investors.


Now, Microsoft will sell its stake in Nook Media back to Barnes & Noble for about $125 million.

"As the respective business strategies of each company evolved, we mutually agreed that it made sense to terminate the agreement," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement.

Barnes & Noble stock fell about 5 percent Thursday on news of the announcement.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Claudia Emerson passed away Thursday at the age of 57, 

. Emerson won the prize in 2006 for her book 

 and served as Virginia's poet laureate from 2008 to 2010. More recently, she conducted research in Italy on a Guggenheim fellowship, returning to her home state to assume a post teaching at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2013.


storied feud between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal

 got: When Mailer shoved Vidal down backstage after a terse TV interview, Vidal parried the blow with a remark of his own: "Words fail Norman Mailer yet again."


, he dove deeply into the trod-upon underworlds of both cities to examine the effects of poverty personally. But for some time now, it has been in question just how deep Orwell truly went, and how much of his stories he might have made up instead.
Well, 

 that at least one of his stories is accurate: the 1931 incident recounted in Orwell's unpublished essay "Clink," in which he baited police by being publicly drunk, drawing 48 hours in a London prison to investigate conditions there. The newspaper cites Dr. Luke Seaber, who claims to have discovered court records that offer "unambiguous external confirmation that Orwell did indeed carry out, more or less as described, one of his 'down-and-out' experiments."
Elsewhere, an essay by Robert Butler in 

 reflects on the decades that have passed since Orwell's death — decades that have been exceedingly kind to his legacy. And even as Orwell's reputation endures, readers are reminded that this is partly because 

"There are many Orwells," Butler writes. "The literary Orwell sits at his typewriter with a rollie dangling from his lip. The militant Orwell stands head and shoulders above his fellow anti-fascist recruits in Spain. The rural Orwell crouches down to feed a goat (he liked to lecture his less practical friends, such as V.S. Pritchett, on milking). The paternal Orwell fits a shoe on the foot of his young son, perched on his knee."

Indian President Pranab Mukherjee is drawing flak from brick-and-mortar booksellers for his exclusive deal with Amazon. The deal means that his book 

The Dramatic Decade: The Indira Gandhi Years

, which sees release Dec. 11, will be available only through Amazon for its first three weeks — after which other booksellers will finally get a crack at it. As 

Arts and Culture

The Thread® - Books and Literary News

Colin Dwyer

Author

A two-year partnership in the bookseller's troubled e-reader has ended, as Barnes & Noble buys out Microsoft's share.

Barnes & Noble, Microsoft Part Ways Over The Nook

Go Deeper.

Like this?

News you can use in your inbox