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:
“Melania decided she would order the flowers herself.” The New York Times Book Review has published its first-ever commissioned short story: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Arrangements.” Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, the story revolves around Ivanka and Melania Trump. The Book Review has commissioned another author to write a story about the Clinton campaign, which will be published in the fall.
Menachem Butler investigates Elie Wiesel’s hundreds of Yiddish newspaper articles that have been largely overlooked by Wiesel scholars. In one series of articles, Wiesel chronicles his 1957 road trip across America, describing the “small towns floating in the fog” of San Francisco, the Rocky Mountains wearing “a crown of snow,” and how he had found “a Garden of Eden for children here in this life”—Disneyland. (Tablet)
Amazon has rolled out a new Kindle navigation tool, Page Flip, which will make it easier for readers to hold their place in an e-book while quickly flipping to other sections of the text. (Tech Crunch)
Annalisa Quinn writes a tribute to the humor and feminist website the Toast, which will close its virtual doors this Friday. “The secret to the Toast’s greatness (and, maybe, the reason for its downfall) was its unwillingness to try for broad appeal.” (NPR)
Audiobooks are on the rise, with sales up by approximately 20 percent in 2015. Self-published audiobooks are also becoming more popular, with some authors making more money from the royalties off their audiobooks than from their print and e-books. (Publishers Weekly)
Meanwhile, Barnes & Noble has launched its NOOK Press Print Platform, which will allow authors from NOOK Press—the retailer’s self-publishing platform—to sell their titles as print books in Barnes & Noble stores. This news comes after last week’s announcement that the bookstore chain will open four “concept stores,” which will feature larger café areas serving wine, beer, and food. (Chicago Tribune)
“Just because I’m scrolling through a feed or reading the newspaper or idly jumping from website to website doesn’t mean that my brain shuts off. It’s still trying to flesh out characters, create scenes, work out plot points, or think of a better way to structure a paragraph.” Novelist and essayist Laila Lalami on how to accept procrastination as part of her writing practice. (Los Angeles Times)
