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:
Italian novelist Elena Ferrante is one of the Financial Times Women of the Year. In her interview, the author of the best-selling Neopolitan novels discusses her choice to remain anonymous, the difference between “good” and “authentic” writing, and how her writing is “motivated and fed by the accidental bumping of my life against the lives of others.”
Novelist Claire Vaye Watkins talks about her debut novel, Gold Fame Citrus, and her recently published essay, “On Pandering,” which sparked a wide variety of responses from the literary world. The essay describes how Watkins has internalized the sexism she encounters as a woman writer, and the ways in which he has found herself pandering to the desires of white male academics in order to be more respected. (NPR)
At the New Statesman, writer Melissa Benn reflects on the work of Vivian Gornick, one of the “supreme essayists of the past fifty years,” who “bridges the worlds of Joan Didion and Meghan Daum, Susan Sontag and Leslie Jamison, without ever having achieved the cultural glamour or worldly success of any of these figures.”
Daniel Halpern, founding editor of Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins, talks about how he got his start at the press and how writing poetry shapes his work as an editor. “In terms of editing, I hear the language in the way I would write poetry…. Others are more plot oriented. Poetry is a whole different kind of editing. You cut poems, change lines, change endings, fix line breaks.” (New York Times)
The New York Times book critics have released their picks for the top books of 2015.
On the seventh anniversary of his arrest, writers including Margaret Atwood and Ian Rankin have joined PEN International in urging China to release Nobel laureate and poet Liu Xiaobo for “inciting subversion of state power.” Xiaobo authored a manifesto in 2008 calling for democratic and human rights reform in China. He was charged in 2009 and sentenced to eleven years in prison. His wife, poet Liu Xia, remains under house arrest. PEN’s statement said: “[Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia’s] words reverberate across the globe and we will continue to fight for their freedom until China heeds our call. They may be imprisoned but we will not let them be silenced.” Listen to Liu Xia’s poetry translated by Ming Di from her new book Empty Chairs at the Page One podcast.
According to a new study, the average length of books has increased by 25 percent over the last fifteen years. James Finlayson, who conducted the survey for publisher Flipsnack, says the shift may be attributed to the rise of digital reading. (Guardian)
