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:
The Guardian reports on the growing number of bookstores joining Barnes & Noble's boycott of Amazon Publishing.
In this translated open letter by Syrian author Khaled Khalifa, he writes of the current situation in his home country, "I would like to inform you that my people is being subjected to a genocide." (Arabic Literature)
Hemingway and Gellhorn, a new film about Ernest Hemingway and his third wife, journalist Martha Gellhorn, will premiere on HBO in May. Clive Owen will play Hemingway to Nicole Kidman's Gellhorn, with Parker Posey, Robert Duvall, and David Strathairn in the supporting cast. (New York Daily News)
In this essay examining the merits and flaws of Caitlin Flanagan's provocative new book, Girl Land, the Millions wonders what free-love espousing H. G. Wells would have made of it all.
Vanity Fair takes a look at books with second lives, including Emma Straub's Other People We Married, which was published by a small press last year, and rereleased by Riverhead this week.
Given that there are 28,966 one-star reviews for Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby on GoodReads, book critic Lev Grossman ponders aesthetic judgment in the age of the Internet, "the weird way in which our response to a work of art, while intensely personal, feels like it’s universally and objectively true." (Time)
Jason Diamond shares the travails and hazards of moving from part-time barista to full-time writer. (New York Times)
Flavorwire assembles an essential postmodern reading list, including Donald Barthelme's Sixty Stories, and Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker.
