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 portraying characters that other people already recognize, characters whose further adventures other people already want to read, nonprofessional creators can find a wholly voluntary, non-paying audience of people whom they will never meet.” Poet and critic Steph Burt considers the evolution and potential of fan fiction. (New Yorker)
Plan your next literary road trip with this list of a hundred books—one fiction and one nonfiction book set in every state in America. (Literary Hub)
In the vein of Roberto Bolaño, new books by Latin American fiction writers Diego Zúñiga, Samanta Schweblin, and Mariana Enriquez, combine horror motifs with comic sensibilities to “stunning ends,” writes Lucas Iberico Lozada at Paste, adding that the books provide a “refreshingly disturbing angle with which to view the discomforts and fears of the outside world, offering neither the distance of a dystopian landscape or the drudging proximity of literary realism that plagues U.S. fiction.”
Meanwhile, Publishers Weekly profiles six contemporary Chinese fiction writers whose work represents the breadth of ways Chinese writers are contending with their country’s complex political legacy and current-day changes.
“Words are our weapons: words, truth, history and, dare I say it, love.” At PEN America, writers Claire Messud, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Rion Amilcar Scott, and Robert Pinsky share their reflections on last week’s events in Charlottesville.
Netflix will release two new literary documentaries later this year—Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold and Gay Talese’s Voyeur. (Deadline)
