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:
Following the release of the David Foster Wallace biopic The End of the Tour, Christian Lorentzen discusses the shifting figure and public perception of the late author. “He has become a character, an icon, and in some circles a saint. A writer who courted contradiction and paradox, who could come on as a curmudgeon and a scold, who emerged from an avant-garde tradition and never retreated into conventional realism, he has been reduced to a wisdom-dispensing sage on the one hand and shorthand for the Writer As Tortured Soul on the other.” (Vulture)
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has found Apple guilty of orchestrating a conspiracy with five publishers to increase the prices of e-books. The ruling affirms a 2013 decision by New York City judge Denise Cote that Apple had played a “central role” in the conspiracy to raise e-book prices. Apple is now required to pay $450 million in consumer refunds. (Publishers Weekly)
This morning, best-selling author James Patterson announced the first round of school libraries to receive grants from the initiative he announced in March. Patterson pledged to give $1.5 million to school libraries in need this year, beginning with an installment of $500,000 distributed across 127 schools. Last year, Patterson gave more than $1 million to independent bookstores across the country. (Washington Post)
“Often it seems that our experience of the words once written down is as volatile and precarious as our other sense impressions. No reader ever really takes complete control of a book—it’s an illusion—and perhaps to expend vast quantities of energy seeking to do so is a form of impoverishment.” Tim Parks writes for the New York Review of Books about how reading is essentially a form of forgetting.
Egypt’s Ministry of Religious Endowments has announced that it will “purge and confiscate” books in mosque libraries that call for “fundamentalism and extremism, and call for the opposite of moderate Islam.” (Melville House)
Is genre labeling still necessary? Authors Dana Stevens and Leslie Jamison discuss the current usefulness of categorizing literature. (New York Times)
At Electric Literature, Steve Paulson interviews literary critic James Wood about the art of book reviewing, how fiction has become a secular form of scripture, the task of the writer, and more.
