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:
Nobel Prize–winning German author Günter Grass has passed away at age eighty-seven. Grass, who was one of Germany’s “leading public intellectuals” following World War II, was best known for his 1959 anti-Nazi novel The Tin Drum. (NPR)
Publisher Penguin Random House is offering free excerpts of select e-book titles on Amtrak’s Acela Express train, which travels between Boston and Washington, D. C. The publisher plans to expand this e-book feature to all Northeast Regional trains that have Wi-Fi service in the next few months. (GalleyCat)
National Library Week 2015 has begun. Sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA), the week is intended to “celebrate the contributions of our nation’s libraries and librarians and to promote library use and support.”
Following several recent disputes over the accuracy of translated literature (for example, Robin Robertson’s translations of Tomas Tranströmer), poet Elisa Gabbert considers the role of expertise in literary criticism. (Electric Literature)
Meanwhile, at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Virginia Jackson profiles the work of literary and cultural critic Lauren Berlant, who, she suggests, exhibits Matthew Arnold’s belief that “criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge.”
Did you attend the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Minneapolis over the weekend? If not, read Publishers Weekly’s extended coverage of this year’s conference.
He may be the father of Deconstructionist philosophy, but Jacques Derrida’s college admission essay on Shakespeare was “quite unintelligible.” (Open Culture)
