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:
Barnes & Noble has announced the winners of the 2017 B&N Discover Awards. Abby Geni won in fiction for her debut novel, The Lightkeepers, and Matthew Desmond won in nonfiction for his book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. They will each receive $30,000 and a full year of marketing support from the bookstore.
“Carrère’s work suggests that we might come to nonfiction not to imagine ourselves being understood, not to feel less alone but to actively imagine understanding and understanding’s limits. It is in this way that his books display how thinking about other people feels: lonely, but nourishingly so.” The New York Times profiles France’s “greatest writer of nonfiction,” Emmanuel Carrère.
Arnav Adhikari talks with Lauren Elkin about her new book, Flâneuse, and her effort to bring to light a history of female artists who channeled the city into their art. (Atlantic)
Actor Alec Baldwin and writer Kurt Anderson are teaming up to publish a satirical book about President Trump. “You Can’t Spell America Without ME: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President Donald J. Trump” will be published by Penguin Press in November. (Los Angeles Times)
Yesterday Amazon opened its first brick-and-mortar bookstore on the east coast, a 5,800-square-foot space in Dedham, Massachusetts, ten miles from Boston. This spring the e-retailer also plans to open stores in New York City, New Jersey, and Lynnfield, Massachusetts. (Publishers Weekly)
“When I finally decided to embrace writing about color, that decision was momentous. What I was really saying was that I was ready to dismantle the ways in which racism had impacted, defined, and constrained me both as a black woman and as a writer.” The Paris Review interviews fiction writer Christine Lincoln on writing about race.
At BOMB, Sam Lipsyte interviews George Saunders about the challenges he faced writing his new book, Lincoln in the Bardo. For an in-depth profile of Saunders, read “The Emotional Realist Talks to Ghosts,” featured in this issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“With a lot of the things we face, having really good questions, rather than having glib answers, is important.” Rebecca Solnit talks with the Washington Post about mansplaining, asking good questions, and her new book, The Mother of All Questions.
