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:
Yesterday, the United States Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a list of English-language books found in Osama Bin Laden’s Pakistan compound. Among the thirty-nine titles, which were recovered during the 2011 Navy SEAL raid, were Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky and Obama’s Wars by Bob Woodward. CBS News has published several reactions from authors whose books were found on Bin Laden’s reading list. (Washington Post)
The Long Island, New York, home where F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda lived from 1922–1924 is up for sale for $3.8 million. Fitzgerald is believed to have penned The Great Gatsby while living in the house. (Guardian)
Dante Alighieri’s 750th birthday is this week. John Kleiner writes for the New Yorker about the poet’s enduring influence on Italian culture.
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tom Lutz interviews iconic poet Nikki Giovanni about her founding of the Black Writers Conference in the 1960s, her relationship with Mohammed Ali, children’s literature, and more. Giovanni recently delivered the keynote address at the 2015 LA Writers Conference.
With heated debates over trigger warnings abounding on college campuses, Jeet Heer examines the evolution of trigger warnings and the cultural history of stress. Heer notes that some historians trace the earliest case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1. (New Republic)
The latest installment of the Poetry Foundation’s PoetryNow podcast features Solmaz Sharif reading her new poem “Persistence of Vision with Gwendolyn Brooks.”
“The thing about this book is the time that it is going to take to write and that no one’s time on Earth is guaranteed….The book must continue to be fragile for years and years as it grows into being. That’s a terrifying feeling, but the only way to get through that terror is to embrace it and love it in its moment.” House of Leaves author Mark Z. Danielewski talks with the Rumpus about his twenty-seven-volume serial novel The Familiar.
