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:
Danish fiction writer Dorthe Nors talks about experimenting with form in her stories, and how certain formal constraints, such as writing in only headlines, add to the themes in her work: “[The stories are] about women on the brink of becoming invisible. In the no-man’s-land (no pun intended) between being a younger woman and a woman with no particular purpose, these women struggle to find their essence…. The distilled form of these texts prove very useful. These women are fighting for their voices to be heard, and the poetic, concentrated, and vocal form add to this theme.” Nors’s English translation of her collected novellas, So Much for That Winter, comes out June 21 from Graywolf Press. (BOMB)
Speaking of Graywolf, if you want to read the press’s titles months before their publication date, join the newly launched Graywolf Galley Club. Members of the Galley Club receive six pre-publication galleys of forthcoming poetry, fiction, and nonfiction throughout the year, as well as invitations to the press’s events, swag, and more. If you join before July 15, membership is $16 per month, or $192 for the year.
Poet Farnoosh Fathi founded the Young Artists Language & Devotion Alliance (YALDA), a New York City–based literary intensive and publishing platform for young women writers ages twelve to nineteen. At the Poetry Society of America, Fathi speaks about the alliance’s mission and the importance of working with young writers.
At the Rumpus, Ravi Shankar, poet and founder of the literary magazine Drunken Boat, discusses coediting and publishing the anthology Union: 15 Years of Drunken Boat, 50 Years of Writing From Singapore.
Gregory Rabassa, translator of influential Latin American authors including Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar, has died at age ninety-four. Rabassa won a National Book Award for his translation of Cortázar’s Hopscotch, and translated Márquez’s seminal novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, as well as five other novels by the Nobel Prize–winner. Márquez called Rabassa the “best Latin American writer in the English language.” (Los Angeles Times)
If your writing practice involves a “curious habit,” you’re not alone. Friedrich Schiller kept rotting apples in his desk, because the smell apparently inspired him to write. This infographic details the curious work habits of eighteen famous writers. (Global English Editing)
