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.
“Almost all of our lives and thinking exist in spaces of ambiguity, uncertainty and doubt,” says Garth Greenwell. “Art seems to me precisely the tool we have for allowing ourselves the fullness of human thinking.” In a new conversation with Amy Gall, Greenwell talks writing process, politics and public life, sex and love. His second book of fiction, Cleanness, was published yesterday by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (Poets & Writers Magazine)
Attorneys for Audible have announced the company will settle with the seven publishers who filed a lawsuit against the audiobook giant in August last year. The plaintiffs, which include all of the “Big Five” houses, had submitted that a new in-app feature, Audible Captions, violated copyright by generating unauthorized text. The terms of the settlement have not yet been disclosed, but documents are expected by January 21. (Guardian)
Having just completed ten years at Henry Holt, Steve Rubin shared that he will be leaving his position as chairman. “My time here has been among the happiest in my career,” Rubin says. (Publishers Lunch)
Belarusian writer and Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich plans to launch a new press exclusively dedicated to publishing women writers. Works by Eva Veznavets and Tatyana Skorkina will be among the first titles. (Calvert Journal)
The Atlantic has announced it will begin to publish fiction “with far greater frequency than we’ve managed in the past decade.” “Birdie” by Lauren Groff is kicking off the new editorial initiative.
Jeanine Cummins talks to the New York Times about her forthcoming book, American Dirt, and the risks and responsibilities of writing from the perspective of Mexican migrants as someone far removed from their world.
Jenny Odell reflects on a fortuitous encounter with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays, and what reading the transcendentalist taught her to see in her own writing. “Hard as I might work, I will be anything but self-made.” (Paris Review Daily)
Book Marks anticipates eleven titles by Indigenous authors set for release in the first half of 2020.
