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:
HarperCollins has launched a new program called the HarperCollins Promotional Fund, which will provide additional funds to independent retailers to help market the publisher's books. (Publishers Weekly)
At the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks discusses the relationship between reading genre fiction and literary fiction, and explores the notion of “reading upward.”
With the release of Dave Eggers’s latest novel, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And The Prophets, Do They Live For Ever?, which is written entirely in dialogue, Alex Kalamaroff at the Rumpus offers a history of the dialogue novel, a form tackled by writers from Diderot to David Foster Wallace.
The New York Times profiles fiction author Jess Row, whose novel Your Face in Mine, out this week from Riverhead Books, involves a white man who undergoes “racial reassignment surgery” to become black. “I wanted to imagine the most radical kind of integration,” Row says about the book, “the kind you can't undo.”
Roger Stone, a writer and former aide to President Richard Nixon, has written a new book entitled Nixon’s Secrets. The book was released by Skyhorse Publishing yesterday, on the fortieth anniversary of Nixon’s resignation. (GalleyCat)
Writers Maxine Hong Kingston and Julia Alvarez are among the recipients of the 2013 National Medal of Arts awards, the “highest award given to artists and patrons by the federal government.” President Obama presented the awards at a recent ceremony at the White House. (National Endowment for the Arts)
The A. V. Club reviews Haruki Murakami’s newest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki And His Years Of Pilgrimage—which sees its U.S. release today—calling it the author’s “most human novel yet.”
And on the subject of reviews, the New Republic has republished a 1933 review of Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon—a “manhood-challenging” critique that caused the author to walk into critic Max Eastman’s office in New York and slap him across the face with a book.
