Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:
In her recent New Yorker essay, Kathryn Schulz asks why Henry David Thoreau’s writing is still respected, given that he was a narcissistic misanthrope. At the Atlantic, Jedediah Purdy responds to Schulz’s article with a defense of Thoreau: “Thoreau is no model, but he is a useful and difficult conversation partner across the centuries, a difficult friend as he was a difficult citizen.”
One of the ten remaining copies of the 1631 Sinners Bible is to be auctioned by Bonhams next month. The rare biblical text is known as the “Adulterous” or “Sinners Bible” because, due to a printing error, the seventh commandment leaves off the word “not,” so it reads, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” (Guardian)
The popular horror-comedy podcast Welcome to Night Vale—launched in 2012 by Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink—is now a 401-page novel. Harper Perennial published a print run of 100,000 copies of the novel yesterday; if the book is a commercial success, it may inspire more publishers to pick up podcast-to-novel projects. (Telegraph)
Amazon’s senior vice president and the New York Times have been publicly sparring this week on the digital story sharing platform Medium. The debate began on Monday when Amazon’s Jay Carney posted a rebuttal to a Times investigative article from August, which painted an unflattering portrait of Amazon’s work culture.
“Can one ever know ‘too much’ about a writer?” Tim Parks discusses his experience of reading the nearly three-thousand-page Collected Works of Primo Levi, which led him to subsequently research more details about the author’s life. (New York Review of Books)
According to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center, fewer Americans are reading print books than in previous years. Seventy-two percent of respondents reportedly read at least one book over the past year, versus 79 percent in 2001.
“My life as an editor and a person in the world is fairly orderly and regular, which allows me to explore dangerous territory in my writing.” Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin interviews author and W. W. Norton executive director Jill Bialosky about balancing her full-time job as an editor with her writing life, and about her new novel, The Prize.
