John Heath-Stubbs, a British poet and translator who used classical myth as an inspiration for his verse, died Tuesday. He was 88. The 1973 winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry died at the Athlone House Nursing Home in west London, the facility said. The cause of death was not announced.

Heath-Stubbs' works included poetry, plays, criticism and translations, including The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam with Peter Avery in 1979 and his own epic poem, Artorius: A Heroic Poem in Four Books and Eight Episodes published in 1973.

Other works included 1969's Satires and Epigrams and The Immolation of Aleph published in 1985.

A close friend, Guthrie McKie, said Heath-Stubbs, who slowly lost his eyesight and went completely blind in 1978, had been diagnosed with lung cancer earlier this year.

[T]here is also schadenfreude and a tone of self-righteousness, a kind of group we-told-you-so that is almost biblical: at long last, the outsider, the sinner, has been punished for her sins. She went too far—what was the last straw? O.J., Mickey Mantle, her alleged anti-Semitic remarks?—and she was finally stopped. The rest of us are cleansed.

It's an understandable reaction and one for which, it must be said, PW is partly responsible. And yet, I can't help feeling that for all of our smugness, we may be in for a teaching moment of the be-careful-what-you-wish for variety. Regan and her eponymous imprint, after all, did serve an important, counterintuitive function: she published profitable junk that the rest of us would rather not touch. It served us all well to have Judith Regan and her questionable taste to react against;the truth is we needed her, if only to make ourselves feel better about our choices.

*****

Still, the common wisdom is that Regan simply had to go, that she had become a public embarrassment to her company and to all of publishing. While that's certainly true, I'm deeply skeptical about the suggestion that firing Regan means the book business has, at long last, re-found its soul. It's a business, after all, and if publishing to the lowest common denominator is what makes companies profitable, then that's the kind of publishing we're going to continue, at least sometimes, to do.

As expected, there were a few surprises in store for us as we pored through your submissions for our first Word of the Year online survey. Either the vast majority of you out there in the Merriam-Webster online community are big fans of The Colbert Report, or Time Magazine was right on target when it honored the show's host Stephen Colbert earlier this year as one of the most influential people of 2006. By an overwhelming 5 to 1 majority vote, our visitors have awarded top honors to a word Colbert first introduced on "The Word" segment of his debut broadcast on Comedy Central back in October 2005.

1. truthiness (noun)

1. : "truth that comes from the gut, not books" (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," October 2005)
2. : "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true" (American Dialect Society, January 2006)

1. google
2. decider
3. war
4. insurgent
5. terrorism
6. vendetta
7. sectarian
8. quagmire
9. corruption

Dozens of literary masterpieces and international bestsellers have been banned in Iran in a dramatic rise in censorship that has plunged the country's publishing industry into crisis. Companies that once specialised in popular fiction and other money-spinners are being restricted to academic texts under a cultural freeze instigated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Several thousand new and previously published works have been blacklisted by Iran's culture and Islamic guidance ministry, which vets all books.

Terry Chevalier's best-selling novel Girl With a Pearl Earring has been banned after completing six print runs. Dozens of literary masterpieces and international bestsellers have been banned in Iran in a dramatic rise in censorship that has plunged the country's publishing industry into crisis. Companies that once specialised in popular fiction and other money-spinners are being restricted to academic texts under a cultural freeze instigated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Several thousand new and previously published works have been blacklisted by Iran's culture and Islamic guidance ministry, which vets all books.

Newly banned books include Farsi translations of Tracy Chevalier's best-seller Girl With a Pearl Earring and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, the latter for upsetting clerics within Iran's tiny Christian community. Chevalier's novel has completed six print runs in Iran and earned hefty profits for its local publisher, Cheshme.

Another publishing house has been banned from selling a successful series of books featuring lyrics by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Black Sabbath, Queen and Guns n' Roses. Stores were told to remove the books or face closure. Permission was subsequently denied for the publisher to reprint. The crackdown also covers classics, such as William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and scores of works by Iranian authors.

The Out of Sight star has purchased the rights to Grisham's non-fiction book, The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town, which was released in October (06). The book tells the true story of a gross miscarriage of justice that sent Ron Williamson to Oklahoma's death row for 11 years for a murder he didn't commit. Williamson was convicted based on eyewitness testimony from the man who was ultimately convicted of the murder. Grisham's previous courtroom thrillers The Firm, The Rainmaker, The Client and A Time to Kill have sparked fevered bidding wars, culminating in a then-record $8 million (GBP4 million) deal for Runaway Jury.

Grisham has been disappointed with several of the adaptations of his books and decided to take a pay cut in order to have more creative control over his projects. He decided to hand over the rights only after several conversations with Clooney and film partner Grant Heslov and viewing their Oscar-nominated film Good Night, and Good Luck.

During National Novel Writing Month, quantity is everything, and quality is merely optional. As a result, participants are defined by, goaded by and obsessed by their word counts. Anyone who reaches at least 50,000 words is deemed a winner. Shortly after the clock struck midnight on Thursday, the results for this year were in: nearly 13,000 of the writers reported making it to the finish.

Each year exhausted and triumphant writers insert their novels into the word-count verifier - the words are encrypted in case anyone might want to steal that brilliant mess - on the official Web site, nanowrimo.org. It is done on the honor system, which means that someone could theoretically submit "The Great Gatsby" (about the right length).

Winners receive an online certificate, and "win or lose, you rock for even trying," the site says. Even the nonfinishers are invited to the "Thank God It’s Over" parties, and they can have their words included in the collective final word count, which was 982,495,939 this year.

For many of the writers the month is as much a series of social events as a way to put together a novel. But that is not to minimize the true suffering that occurs. Every year more than 80 percent of those who sign up for the project do not finish, often because the experience is just too painful. First there is the toll on the rest of the novelist's life, with friends, family, co-workers and living spaces sure to be neglected.

Ah, rewriting. It hurts so bad, but it helps so much. If your book was born in November, it's going to take many, many months (if not years) of revision before it's ready for the bookstore shelves. That's the bad news. The good news is that novel rewriting is just as exciting and satisfying as novel writing (if not more so!).