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:
Molly Antopol, Leslie Jamison, Phil Klay, and Claudia Rankine are among the authors shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Literary Awards. The literary and human rights organization PEN American Center announced the shortlists this morning, and will give $150,000 to writers, editors, and translators as part of its annual awards. Read more about the shortlisted authors on the G&A Blog. (New York Times)
In celebration of Short Story Month, Vintage Books will digitally release a new short story every day throughout the month of May. Available at $0.99 each, stories will include classics by Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Edgar Allan Poe, and Langston Hughes, alongside new work by Alexander McCall Smith, Carrie Brown, Hari Kunzru, and more. (GalleyCat)
The Writing Future Report, commissioned by writer development agency Spread the Word and launched at the London Book Fair today, has found that writers of color in the United Kingdom are increasingly pigeonholed by ethnicity within the publishing industry. According to the Guardian, the report suggests that black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) writers are often persuaded by agents and editors to “write literary fiction conforming to a stereotypical view of their communities, addressing topics such as ‘racism, colonialism, or post-colonialism as if these were the primary concerns of all BAME people.’” The report includes a series of recommendations, including an industry-wide diversity plan focused on internal audits to address cultural bias.
John Wiley & Sons president and CEO Stephen M. Smith announced that he will retire due to medical reasons as of June 1. The agency's board has elected current executive vice president and COO Mark Allin as Smith’s successor. (Publishers Weekly)
Journalist and author Ben Parr will send his new book, Captivology: The Science of Capturing People’s Attention, into space this Saturday. Funds from operation #SpaceBook, which was developed by the Columbus Space Program, will support education in science, technology, engineering, and math, as well as the arts. (PRWeb)
Digital subscription service Scribd will add 9,000 audiobook titles from the Penguin Random House list to its library. New titles include work by Alice Munro, Lee Child, Harlan Coben, Anne Rice, and Deepak Chopra, among others. With the recent addition, the company's library now includes more than 45,000 audiobooks. (GalleyCat)
Meanwhile, Simon & Schuster has signed a deal with the new digital-media streaming app Playster. Under the agreement, the publisher will offer unlimited access to a backlist of select e-book titles from its U.S. and international catalogue through the subscription service, which is designed similarly to Scribd and Oyster and is currently in beta. (GalleyCat)
“…there are mutants, slavers, enormous albino vampire bats and all sorts of other terrible things haunting and scrabbling around Percy’s blasted landscape. He actually falls back on some old monster movie tropes here—critters that we haven’t seen skittering across the pages of our stories for a long time. I mean seriously, when’s the last time you saw characters fighting off giant spiders?” At NPR, Jason Sheehan reviews Benjamin Percy’s new novel, The Dead Lands, a post-apocalyptic reimagining of the Lewis and Clark story. To hear from Percy about the new book, and how movie monsters influence his writing, listen to the first episode of Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast.
