Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories.
“There is, I realize now, a certain irony to the fact that a journey beginning with that debauched and hallucinatory tale has brought me to one of the most serene and peaceful places I’ve been.” At the Guardian, Kevin EG Perry spends a night at Owl Farm, Hunter S. Thompson’s cabin in Colorado, which is now available for rent.
At the New York Times, Jessica Francis Kane considers the perils of having a writer as a houseguest. “When not dosing himself with laudanum, Coleridge drank gin, and often woke screaming in the night, terrifying Wordsworth’s family.”
“Is the aphorism—empirical or mystical, funny or fragmentary—a living form?” Adam Gopnik considers the half-truths and mysticism of being “intelligently succinct.” (New Yorker)
“I have to write a hundred dumb lines to get to the right one it seems. This used to be more like 5–1 or 10–1 when I was younger.” Poet, songwriter, and musician David Berman talks to Travis Nichols about his new band name, songs that anyone can sing, and the reissue of his poetry collection, Actual Air. (Poetry)
Publishers Weekly speaks to ten authors with highly anticipated debuts publishing this fall, including Ayşe Papatya Bucak, author of the story collection The Trojan War Museum, and Jeffrey Colvin, author of the novel Africaville.
“His later work, written in prose, mixing realistic and fantastic elements, is made up of little stories full of poetry that tend to be as concise and tightly structured as verse.” Charles Simic on James Tate’s final collection, The Government Lake. (Washington Post)
“I realized that as a writer, I never walk without working. On Wordsworth’s better soil, I’ve built an office.” Michael LaPointe charts how the writing-walking movement was co-opted by the very forces it sought to resist. (Atlantic)
And Karen Russell talks to the Rumpus about her new story collection, Orange World, and what it means to write fantasy that relates to the “fiery and uncertain” present. “I just wanted there to be a note of hope and some feeling that even if the green world feels impossibly remote right now, even that is a place that we can all imagine ourselves into.”
