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 subscription e-book streaming service Oyster, billed as the “Netflix for books,” is shuttering. Several of Oyster’s team members are moving to Google’s online e-book store Google Play Books. Oyster launched in 2012. (Re/code)
Literary agent Carmen Balcells—who represented acclaimed Latin American authors including Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Pablo Neruda—died Sunday at age eighty-five. Barcells is known as a driving force behind the “Latin American Boom” of literary works published in the 1960s and 1970s. (Associated Press)
At the New Republic, Evan Kindley considers the success of the crowd-sourced annotation website Genius and the rise of literary annotation. “Never before has there been so much activity in the margins of culture.”
“Art is translation: We etch rugged, imperfect creatures from our lived experiences.” Fiction writer and musician Daniel José Older talks about how music influences his prose and considers the “joyful kind of failure” that an artist experiences. (Electric Literature)
In an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, writers and teachers Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young trace the history of the graduate writing program, and examine the lack of diversity therein and in the larger literary culture.
You may be surprised by what many in the publishing industry consider a “successful” sales figure for a book, even for works nominated for prestigious literary prizes. Hint: It’s probably lower than you thought. (NPR)
Literary critic and translator Liesl Schillinger and writer James Parker discuss the pleasures of reading books that are considered obscene. “That perception is what even the most unartful obscene books teach us: that the mystery and variety of human desires—whether actual or notional, romantic or repugnant—cannot be seen by the naked eye, or restricted to the naked body.” (New York Times)
