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:
Esquire has amended its controversial list, “80 Books Every Man Should Read,” to include more diverse authors and titles. The new list, “80 Books Every Person Should Read,” was compiled by eight “female literary powerhouses,” including Lauren Groff, Michiko Kakutani, and Roxane Gay.
“Poetry is one of our surest consolations.” Poet Craig Morgan Teicher previews poetry collections coming out in 2016 that reflect and respond to our current moment, and “say what needs to be said about guns, anger, racism, family, and how we can think and feel more precisely and truthfully about one another.” (NPR)
The Chronicle Review features a profile of the Los Angeles Review of Books and its founder, Tom Lutz, who set out to create a new model of literary review, one “not tied to a newspaper or based in a university but creating its own autonomous space, like a nonprofit gallery or museum, supported by a mix of donors, grants, ads, and memberships, and drawing a diverse audience.”
Is the book really better than the movie adaptation? According to a recent analysis from Vocativ, which compared the ratings of eight hundred books on Goodreads with those of their movie adaptations on the Internet Movie Database, the book versions ranked better overall. (Washington Post)
Best-selling author Neil Gaiman will release a new nonfiction collection, The View From the Cheap Seats, at the end of May. Gaiman announced that the book includes speeches, articles, and “all the introductions [I have written] that seemed to be about something bigger than just telling people about the book or author they were going to read.” (Guardian)
In an interview at the Rumpus, poet Elisa Gabbert discusses the politics of online literature, reactions to her Electric Literature advice column, “The Blunt Instrument,” and her poetry collections, The Self Unstable and The French Exit.
Penguin Random House has sold its self-publishing division, Author Solutions, to an affiliate of the Najafi Companies, a private equity firm. Author Solutions, under which approximately two hundred fifty thousand titles have been published, became a part of Penguin Random House in 2013. Several authors charged the company with fraud in the summer of 2013, but the case was dismissed last year. (Publishers Weekly)
Over at Vulture, twenty-eight contemporary authors share the books that changed their lives.
