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:
Novelist James Magnuson will retire in May from his position as director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. During Magnuson’s twenty-three years as director, Michener graduates have published more than 115 books. A search is underway to find his replacement. (Dallas News)
London publisher John Blake claims to have a hard copy of a memoir Mick Jagger wrote in the early eighties. Blake does not have the rights to publish the memoir, which he says, in an article at the Spectator, is about Jagger’s early years in the Rolling Stones and shows a “quieter, more watchful Mick than the fast-living caricature.” According to Jagger’s agent, the rock star does not even remember writing it. (New York Times)
The Guardian and Durham University have released a study that shows 19 percent of readers report sensing the presence or hearing the voices of fictional characters after they have finished reading a book.
“Part of the satisfaction in the act of writing is that it violates numerous taboos of my childhood that still weigh heavily on me.” BOMB interviews Rachel Cusk about her trilogy of experimental novels, the second of which, Transit, came out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux last month.
From concocting her own version of the lotion Molly Bloom uses in James Joyce’s Ulysses to wearing bright tights like Gudrun in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, Rose DeMaris relates the beauty tips she picked up from the heroines of twentieth-century literature. (Millions)
“It manages to turn the past into prophecy and demands that we do the one vital thing we aren’t often enough asked to do with history: learn from it.” The Atlantic reviews Timothy B. Tyson’s new book, The Blood of Emmett Till, and how Till’s death illuminates present-day issues of race in America.
The Wall Street Journal profiles Enrique Ferrari, a janitor by night and a thriller writer by day. Ferrari, who works in Buenos Aires, has published five novels.
Novelist Christina Baker Kline writes about her father’s radical friendliness and the time she and her family road-tripped to Maine and showed up at the house of the famously reclusive E. B. White. (New York Times)
