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:
In advance of the four-hundredth anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death next year, researchers at the University of Texas in Austin have digitally recreated the first museum dedicated to Shakespeare, which closed in 1805. (New York Times)
Edgar Allan Poe had only one best-selling book while he was alive, and it was not The Raven and Other Poems. It was an abridged version of Thomas Wyatt’s textbook about seashells, The Conchologist’s First Book, of which Poe biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes: “Poe’s boring, pedantic and hair-splitting Preface was absolutely guaranteed to torment and discourage even the most passionately interested schoolboy.” (Slate)
“When I wrote the essay that provoked such splenetic responses, I was trying to articulate that there is a canonical body of literature in which women’s stories are taken away from them, in which all we get are men’s stories. And that these are sometimes not only books that don’t describe the world from a woman’s point of view, but inculcate denigration and degradation of women as cool things to do.” Rebecca Solnit considers the negative responses she received from men after publishing an essay that took a feminist view of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. (Literary Hub)
The fight continues to save Britain’s public libraries after it was announced that more than one hundred branches were closed last year and many more branches face closure. The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals is urging the government to abide by the 1964 Public Libraries and Museums Act, which states that “the public has a statutory right to a quality public library service, in the wake of cuts to hundreds of library services across the country.” (Guardian)
At the Oxford American, fiction writer John McManus discusses his process, influences, and his new short story collection Fox Tooth Heart.
Entropy nominates the great literary advocates of 2015, who “use their own resources to promote other writers and literary causes they believe in.”
British musician Morrissey has finally commented on his winning of the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award for his debut novel, List of the Lost, and he is less than impressed with the prize. (Guardian)
