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:
“The piece is dedicated / to me. How strange, / I thought I was new here.” Electric Literature provides a hypertext tribute to poet James Tate, who passed away last week. Tate’s friends, former students, and a number of contemporary poets contributed to the project.
Following the release of Harper Lee’s “lost” novel, Go Set a Watchman, Laura Marsh predicts that many more previously unpublished works by well-known authors will soon surface, including writing by J. D. Salinger, Joan Didion, and Marilynne Robinson. (New Republic)
In yet more Go Set a Watchman news, due to a printing error, an undisclosed number of copies of the British edition of book are missing up to six pages of text. Penguin Random House UK is currently printing replacement copies for those frustrated customers who received faulty copies. (Bookseller)
Meanwhile, at the Globe & Mail, author and CEO of Broadview Press, Don LePan, makes an argument against the need to extend copyright restrictions years after an author’s death.
Hephzibah Anderson looks at several writers who invented languages in their novels—such as Anthony Burgess and George R. R. Martin—and examines the political and societal implications of creating a new lexicon. “Language, as dystopian novels remind us over and over, is a barometer of a society’s health.” (BBC Culture)
“Poetries of information overload—by which I mean poetries and poems that relate either formally or historically to information saturation—demonstrate an extraordinary range of innovative responses to changing technological conditions.” Paul Stephens considers how our data-saturated age can sometimes lead to positive, generative expression for poets. (Guernica)
“The twentieth century brought the rise of the professional, interventionist editor.” Sameer Rahim discusses the quiet and crucial role of literary editors who helped shape classic works by T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, and other famous writers. (Telegraph)
