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:
The National Book Foundation has announced that award-winning writer and comedian Larry Wilmore will host the sixty-seventh National Book Awards ceremony, which will take place on November 16 in New York City. (GalleyCat)
New York Review Books Classics is reissuing Henry Green’s nine novels, which were written between 1926 and 1952. At the New Yorker, writer Leo Robson describes Green’s novels as “terse, intimate, full of accident and unnerving comedy, exquisite though still exuberant.”
At Prairie Schooner, poet Monica Youn discusses her creative process, how her work as a lawyer informs her poetry, and her latest collection, Blackacre.
Meanwhile, NPR’s Ari Shapiro talks with fiction writer David Szalay about his new book, All That Man Is, which is shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Falling somewhere “between a story collection and a novel,” Szalay says the book “can be read either as a sort of slightly disparaging, sort of all that man is, and this is it. Or it can be read as a sort of almost celebratory—everything, all the kind of great variety of experience that life contains.”
Vietnamese authorities have arrested writer Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, a blogger who writes about Vietnam’s government under the pen name Mother Mushroom. Quynh’s blog recently criticized the government’s failure to address a toxic chemical dump that devastated fishing communities along Vietnam’s central coast. Quynh may face up to twelve years in prison. (New York Times)
World Literature Today features an interview with Spanish poet Luis Alberto de Cuenca. “Literary works today must realize that high and popular culture aren’t mutually exclusive, and that the only acceptable division is between good and bad literature, not high and low.”
Author Rebecca Onion considers the difference between apocalyptic novels and “prepper fiction.” “Apocalyptic stories make slow meals of discord and disillusionment. Prepper fiction starts with the cynicism instead of landing there.” (Slate)
