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.
The longlist for the 2019 Booker Prize has been announced. This year’s thirteen nominees for the international prize, which awards £50,000 (approximately $62,486) to a novel written in English and published in the year of the prize, are The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry, My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann, Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, The Wall by John Lanchester, The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy, Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma, Lanny by Max Porter, Quichotte by Salman Rushdie, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak, and Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson. The shortlist will be announced on September and the winner on October 14. (Guardian)
“I partly wanted to capture a period of time where wealthy, influential people allowed themselves to think, ‘Everything’s fine, it’s never going to happen, we’re fine and we’ll always be fine.’” Courtney Maum talks to the Rumpus about how Costalegre, her new novel about the art world of the 1930s, responds to the present.
Read more about Costalegre in “Ten Questions for Courtney Maum” at Poets & Writers.
In the United Kingdom, the Booksellers Association (BA) has launched Green Bookselling: A Manifesto for the BA, Booksellers, and the Book Industry. The manifesto includes recommendations for environmentally friendly industry practices, such as phasing out single-use cardboard and unsolicited book proofs. (Publishers Weekly)
“By the hearth, he kept a harpoon; he used it as a poker.” Jill Lepore on the home life of Herman Melville. (New Yorker)
Paste shares its picks for the top ten novels of the year so far, including Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn, Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James, and Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi.
“I absolutely think that putting poetry next to other problem-solving activities, like doing a crossword puzzle, allows us to approach it with more pleasure…” Podcast host and professor Elisa New on why she asks scientists to read and talk about poetry in a new interview series produced by Nautilus and Poetry in America. (WCAI)
At Electric Literature, novelist Yara Rodrigues Fowler explains why sexual assault survivors don’t owe anyone their story. “I know that healing isn’t a thing that can be done and dusted; it can’t be finished and shut and shelved like a book.”
While the trailer for the new film adaptation of Cats might have disturbed the Internet, Clare Reihill, the administrator of T. S. Eliot’s estate, speculates that the modernist poet, whose collection of children’s verse inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical and now Tom Hooper’s film, might have enjoyed the trailer’s “rich strangeness.” (Guardian)
