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:
Hachette Book Group has signed an agreement to buy Perseus Book Group’s nine publishing imprints, a deal that has been in the making for almost two years. The acquisition, which is Hachette’s largest to date, will increase the number of new books Perseus publishes each year by half. (New York Times)
Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library has opened its complete archive of Seamus Heaney’s correspondence to the public. Hundreds of letters from the Nobel laureate, which date from 1963 to the early 2000s, complement Emory’s “near-complete holding of his publications numbering nearly five hundred items,” according to the library’s literary collection curator Raymond Danowski. (Emory.edu)
Speaking of Seamus Heaney, his final work, a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid VI, will be published posthumously by Faber & Faber this month. (RTE.ie)
Today in miniatures, a Russian scientist named Vladimir Aniskin claims to have created the world’s tiniest book, which he says is eighty-eight times smaller than the area of the previous Guinness Book of Records’ “smallest printed book,” and sixty-seven times smaller than the area of the Russian Book of Records’s “world’s smallest book.” (Guardian)
Kathleen Spivack, an accomplished writer who has published ten books of poetry and nonfiction, recently published her first novel at age seventy-seven. At the Rumpus, Spivack discusses her life as a writer and her debut novel, Unspeakable Things (Knopf), which took twenty years to complete.
Catapult features a new essay series about adoption, with its first two essays by Megan Galbraith and James Han Mattson. Series editor Nicole Chung says, “For many of us who choose to write about adoption, telling our stories often means reclaiming them first—pushing past the easy platitudes, the urge to accept everything we were told and learned to tell, to get to the mixed emotions and difficult truths we might not have known how to express growing up.”
Jacqueline Susanns’s debut novel, Valley of the Dolls, became a best-selling pulp sensation in 1966. But how does it actually hold up fifty years later? “Incredibly well, in fact, if you’re not looking for nuance and shading,” says Tim Murphy at the Nation.
It’s a new month, and Electric Literature is back with a new batch of writer horoscopes. See what the stars have in store for your craft.
