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 Gothic persists, and adapts, too silly to be taken seriously, but too full of sublime terror to leave feathers unruffled. It finds fresh political horrors to satirize and condemn, and new desires to conceal and reveal. It is always available, on the fringe of our society and its fears.” Happy Halloween, dear poets and writers. At the Paris Review, British novelist Sarah Perry writes about the history and lasting appeal of Gothic literature.
Author and philosopher Martha Nussbaum has won the 2018 Berggruen Prize, a $1 million award given annually to a thinker whose ideas “have profoundly shaped human self-understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world.” Nussbaum, 71, is the author of more than forty books. (New York Times)
James Patterson has teamed up with Facebook to create an interactive edition of his forthcoming novel The Chef, a murder mystery set in New Orleans. The multimedia edition, a condensed version of the full book, is available for free on Facebook Messenger and features audio, film clips, and photos that offer more information about characters and other elements of the book, which will be released in hardcover in February. (Publishers Weekly)
Serious spoiler alert: A Russian scientist working in Antarctica is facing attempted murder charges after allegedly stabbing a colleague for telling him the endings of books he had checked out from the remote outpost’s library. (Los Angeles Times)
“Poetry has allowed me to be present in the world in a way that I’m not sure I could have been otherwise.” At the Chicago Review of Books, Ruben Quesada talks to poets Ada Limón, Ben Purkert, and Blas Falconer about suffering, sorrow, and truth.
Hear Limón read from her new book, The Carrying, in a recent episode of Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast.
In the lead-up to the 2018 National Book Awards, Literary Hub’s Emily Temple is conducting brief interviews with each of the finalists. Today’s installments feature authors Domenico Stone and Olga Tokarczuk and their translators, Jhumpa Lahiri and Jennifer Croft.
From the Ampersand archive, listen to Lahiri talk with fellow translator Ann Goldstein.
Next month in London, the British Library will be paying homage to famous cats in literature. A free exhibit, Cats on the Page, coincides with the eightieth anniversary of T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which served as the inspiration for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats. (Evening Standard)
