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:
Speaking to Salon about perceived gender disparity in literary fiction, Jeffrey Eugenides said, "It seems to me that there's a difference between the kinds of books that Jonathan Franzen writes and Jodi Picoult writes—so it's not surprising to me that they're treated differently in terms of review coverage or literary coverage. I don't think that's based on gender." (Jezebel)
J. K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy is out today, with a print run in the United States of two million copies. (Wall Street Journal)
Meanwhile, GalleyCat reports the public's reviews on Amazon are entirely polarized (and most have not actually read the book).
Independent publisher MacAdam/Cage, founded in 1998 in San Francisco—publisher of Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife—is for sale. (Shelf Awareness)
Saratoga Springs, New York, should be getting a new bookshop. Vermont-based Northshire Bookstore signed a letter of intent to open a branch in a new building downtown. (Saratogian)
Indiewire examines the long practice of re-imagining classic literature as animated films.
"Keats was a sorrowful, intermittently fear-ridden man who wrote hauntingly of life’s uncertainty." The Financial Times looks at John Keats: A New Life, Nicholas Roe's biography of the short life of the Romantic poet, out in November from Yale University Press.
"While her early public appearances seemed to have a nervous, shell shocked hostility to them, the only trace of this discomfort on Tuesday came at the very beginning, when she crossed the stage with her head down and her hand up, a waive that doubled as a shield." For #LitBeat at the Millions, Emily M. Keeler covered a recent Zadie Smith event in Toronto, a recording of CBC radio's Writers and Company.
Excerpted from Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story, Aleksandar Hemon discusses the work of Jorge Luis Borges. (Daily Beast)
