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:
The Waywords and Meansigns project has released its third musical adaptation of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which was published sixty-eight years ago today. The adaptation features readings of passages from Joyce’s book paired with performances by jazz and punk musicians, sound artists, and modern composers. More than a hundred artists from fifteen countries contributed to the project. (Open Culture)
Jim Shepard has won the $30,000 Rea Award for the short story, which is given annually to a writer who has “made a significant contribution to the discipline of the short story form.” Deborah Eisenberg, Amy Hempel, and Joy Williams judged.
A study at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Germany shows that people have immediate physical reactions to poetry, or more specifically, “objectively measurable goosebumps that engage the primary reward circuitry.” The study also explores the brain’s differing reactions to music versus poetry. (Seeker, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience)
Translator Burton Watson, known for his “spare, limpid translations” that “opened up the world of classical Japanese and Chinese literature to generations of English-speaking readers,” died last month at the age of ninety-one. (New York Times)
“We pull ourselves together and keep on #resisting—with the help of great poets who have been where we are and lived to fight (and write) another day.” At Harper’s Bazaar, Mary D. Esselman and Elizabeth Ash Velez have compiled a “pussy poetry survival kit” for women, with poems from Warsan Shire, Marge Piercy, and Lucille Clifton, among others.
Henry Hemming’s new biography of Maxwell Knight, the British spymaster considered to be the basis for Ian Fleming’s character “M” in his James Bond books, uncovers seven British spies, including Graham Pollard, a fringe member of the Bloomsbury Group. (Guardian)
“Working in the creative field is unusual in that we are driven to create, regardless of the outcome. But is it sacrilegious to want to earn a living from our artistic endeavors? The sooner we start treating writing as a profession rather than an unpaid calling, the better.” Irish writer Evie Gaughan argues that romanticizing writers hinders them from receiving fair compensation for their work. (Irish Times)
The Verge interviews Dennis Johnson and Julia Fleischaker at Melville House about the publisher’s “recognizable, snotty attitude that’s a mix of humor and anger and passion and intelligence,” and how it takes on Trump and Amazon in social media.
