Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories.
“I didn’t speak at first, then I reacted with great joy, but then I also felt really uncertain. I couldn’t really believe it had happened.” Author Emily Ruskovich has won the world’s richest literary award for a single novel for her debut, Idaho. The prize, the International Dublin Literary Award, awards €100,000 (approximately $112,722) to a winner chosen from a very long list of novels nominated by librarians from around the world. (Guardian)
At the New Yorker, Samanth Subramanian considers the indispensable anger of Arundhati Roy’s essays. “Reading My Seditious Heart, you feel as if Roy has been hollering as extravagantly as possible for years, trying to grab our attention, and we’ve kept motoring on toward the edge of the cliff.”
“I wouldn’t say I was working toward an explicitly feminist project, but I think one of the reasons it took me so many drafts to write some of the chapters, was that they forced me to reflect on myself at the most repulsive time in my life.” Maria Kuznetsova talks to Bookforum about incorporating some of her own biography into Oksana, Behave!, her debut novel.
Today is the beginning of the Poetry to the People tour, an 1,800-mile road trip in which literary nonprofit House of SpeakEasy and storytelling organization Narrative4 will deliver books to underserved communities as they travel in a bookmobile from New York City to New Orleans.
For more about the project, read “Poetry to the People Tour” in the latest issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
O, the Oprah Magazine recommends thirty-two recently released and upcoming books written by women to read this summer, including the novels Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn and Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips.
“How do I allow research to support the story without feeling obligated to remain in the realm of fact—when I am, after all, trying to write fiction?” Author Jake Wolff shares his strategy for tackling a research-intensive story. (Literary Hub)
Along with warm weather and thunder storms, Hanif Abdurraqib hails another sign of the season: the summer crush. “I think I would like to call this moment romantic, too, for all the times I’ve sat outside of a grocery store, or a bar, or an ice cream shop, turning up a song that reminded me of someone in hopes that the music and the memory might intersect and silence the downpour.” (Paris Review)
And the National Endowment for the Arts has announced $1 million in Big Read grants, which will support community reading projects in thirty-one states.
