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:
Italian semiotics scholar and best-selling novelist Umberto Eco died on Friday at age eighty-four. Eco wrote seven novels, including the 1980 best-seller The Name of the Rose, and more than twenty nonfiction books during his career as a writer and academic. Eco’s final book, a collection of essays titled Pape Satan Aleppe. Chronicles of a Liquid Society, will be released this Friday, February 26. (New York Times)
After sixteen years, one man’s impossible quest to comprehensively review the literary world has so far charted 3,687 books from a hundred different countries. At the New Yorker, novelist Karan Mahajan looks at the history and present of Michael A. Orthofer’s Complete Review project. “Orthofer’s project has the self-swallowing pattern of a Borges story: If you set out to read the world, how can you stop?”
Hurrah for print! The first increase in bookstore sales since 2007 has been reported. According to new figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, the sales numbers of brick-and-mortar bookstores in 2015 increased 2.5 percent over the previous year, equating to $280 million more in sales. (Electric Literature)
A Spanish graphic designer named Pepe Gimeno has created a book using weathered detritus he found on beaches instead of words, in order to show the power of the human mind to create narratives when one comes in contact with objects in patterns on a page. The result of the “wordless” experiment surprised the designer, “because of the expressive capacity and poetic power that the material acquires once it is placed and evaluated on the page, and because it clearly shows certain essential functions of the designer: arranging, ordering and sequencing.” The exhibit is currently on display at the Instituto Cervantes in Chicago. (Slate)
An Egyptian court has sentenced author Ahmed Naji to two years in prison over sexually explicit passages in his novel The Use of Life. A private citizen filed the case against Naji, complaining that the passages “caused him distress and heart palpitations.” A number of high-profile Egyptian writers and columnists have expressed outrage and defended Naji, saying the ruling was an attack on free speech. (BBC News)
At NPR, crime novelist Megan Abbot and Sarah Weinman of Publisher’s Lunch discuss the trend of repeatedly comparing crime fiction and thrillers written by women to the same books, namely, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train.
In her recent TED2016 speech, acclaimed fiction and nonfiction writer Lidia Yuknavitch praised the “misfit” writers of the world, and called upon them to tell their stories: “You can be standing dead center in the middle all of your failure, and still I’m only here to tell you: You are so beautiful and your story deserves to be heard.” (TED.com)
