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 National Book Foundation has announced that novelist Don DeLillo is the recipient of the 2015 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. DeLillo will be presented with the lifetime achievement award at the upcoming National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner this November in New York City. (Associated Press)
Before he died in April at the age of eighty-seven, Nobel Prize–winning author Günter Grass completed a final book, entitled Vonne Endlichkait (About Finitude), which was published last Friday in German. The book, which is comprised of a series of short prose sections accompanied by poetry and drawings, explores “aging, loss, and the end of life.” An English translation will be available in the fall of 2016. (DW.com)
“Her three story collections and four darkly funny novels are mostly overlooked by readers but so beloved by generations of fiction masters that she might be the writer’s writer’s writer.” At New York Times Magazine, Dan Kois profiles fiction writer Joy Williams, whose new story collection, The Visiting Privilege, will be published this month by Knopf.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Italian novelist Elena Ferrante—who writes under a pseudonym—rejects speculations that she might be a man, and addresses the gendered experience of women writers. “[The publishing industry and the media] tend to shut women who write away in a literary gynaeceum. There are good women writers, not-so-good ones, and some great ones, but they all exist within the area reserved for the female sex, they must only address certain themes and in certain tones that the male tradition considers suitable for the female gender.” The English translation of the final novel in Ferrante’s acclaimed Neapolitan series, The Story of the Lost Child, is out this week. (Guardian)
In the fourth installment of Electric Literature’s “The Writing Life Around the World” series, author K. Anis Ahmed discusses the murders of secular bloggers that took place in Bangladesh over the past year, and the artistic struggles writers face in an environment where writers are under serious threat.
Why is ambiguity in works of fiction so often praised? Tim Parks examines the function of ambiguity in literature and the need for precision when discussing its uses. “Nothing is less attractive, in a poem or novel, than the feeling that ‘ambiguity’ has simply been constructed or contrived.” (New York Review of Books)
“I think of poetry as being more a transformation of experience rather than a transcription of it.” At NPR, award-winning poet Carl Phillips talks about writing poems that are unconventionally political, and reads a poem from his new collection, Reconnaissance, out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
