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 honor of Emily Dickinson’s birthday, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. will host an eight-hour marathon reading of her verse on Monday, December 8. The Dickinson marathon will feature five- to ten-minute readings from scholars, poets, and fans. (Washington Post)
Get your holiday card inspiration from famous poets! Poet Kevin Young and Lisa Chinn have curated a new exhibition at Poets House in New York City titled “Winter Wedding: Holiday Cards by Poets.” The exhibit features holiday cards and other correspondence from Sylvia Plath, Alice Notley, Robert Creeley, Langston Hughes, and more. (T Magazine)
“For the mindless, passive acceptance of other people’s representations of the world can only enchain us and hamper our personal growth, hamper the possibility of positive action.” At the New York Review of Books, author Tim Parks suggests that actively annotating while reading is an essential “weapon” used to challenge given information and increase one’s engagement with a text and the world.
Ben Okri, who has won the Man Booker Prize, the Guardian Fiction prize, and other prestigious awards, has now won the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Okri’s tenth novel, The Age of Magic, snagged the light-hearted award for a passage that included this sentence: “Somewhere in the night a stray rocket went off.” (Guardian)
At a recent conference in New York City hosted by Business Insider, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos admitted to making “billions of dollars of failures” at the company, but noted that the failures do not matter in the long run. Bezos also commented on Amazon’s public dispute and eventual negotiation with publisher Hachette, stating the battle was a rare occurrence, and that it is an “essential job of any retailer to negotiate hard on behalf of customers. Making reading more affordable is going to make authors more money.” (Telegraph)
Adelle Waldman discusses current resistance to traditional novel conventions over at the New Yorker. Though Waldman shares to an extent the dissatisfaction with “uninspired” contemporary fiction, she suggests that the novel’s formal conventions are not to blame.
From one Waldman to another: Bestselling author Ayelet Waldman took to Twitter to vent her anger after her new novel, Love and Treasure, was not chosen as one of the New York Times Notable Books of 2014. (Daily Dot)
On a lighter note, head over to McSweeney’s and read Brigid Ronan’s humorous “Ideas for Writing a Successful First Novel Critically Praised by the New York Times.”
