New Shelley Poem / Rice U’s Press Online & Free / Heaney for the Forward? / Lost Meaning

New Shelley Poem
In 1811, Percy Shelley published a pamphlet called Existing State of Things. He signed it “A Gentleman of the University of Oxford.” The pamphlet included a 172-line anti-war poem, which was recently discovered. For years, experts debated if the poem existed. It does, and Bernard Quaritch Ltd. is selling it. You also can read about it in the Guardian.

Rice U’s Press Online and Free
In keeping with its mandate to make scholarship available for free, Rice University’s press called Connexions will solicit books via post but publish them online. The price for readers: Free. If a reader wants a hard copy, they can order it from an on-demand printer. Read more in Rebecca Buckman’s Wall Street Journal article.

Heaney on the Forward Shortlist
Nobel prize laureate Seamus Heaney is on the shortlist for the British Forward poetry awards. His twelfth volume of poetry—District and Circle—was nominated for the prize. The work competes with Kate Bingham’s Quicksand Beach, Paul Farley’s Tramp in Flames, Vicki Feaver’s The Book of Blood, Robin Robertson’s Swithering, and Penelope Shuttle’s Redgrove’s Wife.

Lost Meaning
You can’t judge a book by its cover. When the cliché was coined, books didn’t have dust jackets, and they rather all looked similar. Never thought of that until I read Thomas Jones’s Short Cuts in The London Review of Books.