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:
Garbage collectors in Ankara, Turkey, have opened a public library of more than six thousand discarded books that they recovered from the trash. (CNN)
PEN America has announced the finalists for its 2018 literary awards, including the $75,000 Jean Stein Book Award and the $25,000 Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. The winners will be announced on February 20 in New York City.
At the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute this week in Memphis, keynote speaker Junot Díaz implored booksellers and librarians to “stop talking about diversity and start decolonizing shelves” in his keynote address. (Publishers Weekly)
More than two centuries after the death of Scottish poet Robert Burns, a team of U.K. roboticists and AI experts have created an ultra-realistic animation of Burns reading his famous poem, “To a Mouse.” Caroline Wilkinson, the team’s leader, says that this face-mapping technique will be used in the future to create three-dimensional avatars of historical figures. (NBC News)
“When I think of Brooklyn, I think of that kind of interdependence and shared life. I think of music in public spaces. There’s so much I want to keep.” At the Paris Review, fiction writer Naima Coster discusses her debut novel, Halsey Street, the tensions of gentrification, and the ways of being in one’s body that can act as resistance to external change.
“The book, overall, is a painful mess to slog through.” Zabiba and the King, the romance novel Saddam Hussein published in 2000, is now available in an English translation on Amazon. (Business Insider)
“The best fiction is a merging of intelligence, imagination, and arresting language.” Krys Lee, author of the novel How I Became a North Korean, talks with Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master’s Son, about fiction, North Korea, and the relationship between the political and personal. (Los Angeles Review of Books)
Apple is revamping its iBooks app, now called Books, which will offer both audio books and e-books. (TechCrunch)
