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:
This spring, the erotic bestselling series Fifty Shades… accounted for every one out of five adult print books sold, and in light of this, the Daily Beast looks at how this may alter publishing.
Meanwhile, Michelle Dean considers the unpublished erotica of Edith Wharton. (Rumpus)
The New Republic examines how best to use public libraries in an increasingly bookless culture.
Slate asks, "Why does the New Yorker publish so many pieces about the New Yorker?"
Eli Horowitz, the former publisher of McSweeney's, has created a new yearlong project, an app that will deliver a "geo-located mobile serialized story." Oddly, Horowitz doesn't own a smartphone. (BuzzFeed)
"This is one irony of the recent rise of Conceptual writing. Another is that a movement which is so committed to eliminating lyrical charisma has invested so heavily in the charisma of the poet as performer." Matvei Yankelevich writes an open letter in response to Marjorie Perloff's Boston Review essay, "Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric.” (Los Angeles Review of Books)
Actor Daniel Radcliffe will play the lead in a screen adaptation of Joe Hill's 2010 best-selling novel, Horns. (Lit Reactor)
The Courier-Journal makes a pilgrimage to Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, where Henry David Thoreau lived in a cabin, and wrote of his monastic years in the woods, "I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.”
The California Repertory Company intends to mount a theatrical production of a combination of the work of the poet Charles Bukowski and composer Stephen Sondheim. (Guardian)
