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:
Designer and artist Es Devlin has installed a red lion next to the bronze lions in London’s Trafalgar Square that creates poetry via a Google algorithm. Passers-by are invited to “feed” the lion words; the lion then incorporates the words into a two-line verse that appears on a screen in its open mouth. (BBC News)
With the help of a group of book critics, Vulture has put together “a premature attempt at the twenty-first century literary canon,” featuring the hundred most important books of the 2000s so far.
Daniel Alarcón on writing across genres, scrapping a project and starting over, and learning to give up control as an artist. (Creative Independent)
“At nearly 1,200 earnest pages, Book Six is a life-drainer, so dense and so dull that time and light seem to bend around it.” Dwight Garner reviews Karl Ove Knausgaard’s sixth and final installment of his My Struggle series. (New York Times)
David Sedaris on taking walks in places all over the world from Dubai to Sardinia to Wisconsin. (Guardian)
Listen to Sedaris read from his recently published diaries in episode 16 of Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast.
Emma Ramadan on messy first drafts, finding the right book to translate, and her translation from the French of Anne Garréta’s novel Sphinx. (BOMB)
Yesterday Apple released its revamped iBooks app, now called Apple Books. (TechCrunch)
The three novels in Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians series have taken the top three spots on the New York Times paperback fiction best-seller list. (Publishers Weekly)
