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:
Tomorrow at the British auction house Bonhams, roughly $22,000 worth of Agatha Christie’s jewelry will be auctioned—including a long-lost diamond brooch and a three-stone diamond ring dating from the nineteenth century. A Christie fan bought a trunk from the novelist’s estate in 2006, only to discover it contained within it a tightly fastened lockbox. The box went unopened for four years until the fan, Jennifer Grant of East Sussex, England, eventually pried it open with a crowbar and discovered the diamonds, along with a purse of gold coins. The lockbox belonged to Christie’s mother, and the jewels were family heirlooms intended for Christie and her sister. Grant bought the trunk for £100. (NPR)
In other mysterious news, J. K. Rowling tickled fans with a riddle on Twitter yesterday, hinting at a possible new work involving the Harry Potter series. After revealing that she was working on a new novel and screenplay, Rowling responded to fans’ guesses at the novel’s topic by tweeting, “See, now I’m tempted to post a riddle or an anagram.” Hours later came this cryptic clue, which has yet to be deciphered.
David Breithaupt at the Los Angeles Review of Books talks to Amy Bloom about her latest novel, Lucky Us, which explores post–World War II America.
This week, Boston inaugurates the nation’s first “Literary District” in an attempt to bring in tourism by highlighting the city’s rich literary history. Some attractions include pop-up Writers Booths, tours of authors’ favorite haunts, and themed cuisine such as “Mel-Ville Chowder” and “Poe-Boy Sandwich.” The area included in the district also boasts the former homes of Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Robert Lowell, Henry James, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes. Future plans for the project include adding honorary plaques and poetry in store windows, then mapping the project’s attractions in several virtual tour apps. The initial phase of the project began on Sunday with the unveiling of a new statue of Edgar Allan Poe. (Atlantic, Boston Globe)
In this week’s installment of the New York Times Bookends series, authors Cheryl Strayed and Benjamin Moser discuss whether we’re living in a golden age for women essayists. Says Strayed, “…as long as we still have reason to wedge ‘women’ as a qualifier before ‘essayist,’ the age is not exactly golden. And yet it’s hard to deny there’s something afoot. Essayists who happen to be women are having a banner year.”
In a new partnership with Harlequin, Scribd users will now have access to fifteen thousand titles from the publisher’s backlist, including those of its various imprints. Scribd currently has more than eighty million active users. (GalleyCat)
Two seven-figure debut book deals have reportedly come out of the Frankfurt Book Fair this week, including The Girls, a novel by twenty-five-year-old author Emma Cline of New York City, which was acquired in a three-book deal by Kate Medina of Random House. Medina beat out eleven other publishers in the auction. Cline, who works as a fiction reader for the New Yorker, has an MFA from Columbia University and won the 2014 Plimpton Prize for Fiction from the Paris Review. (Publishers Weekly)
