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.
The Washington Post considers the literary leading men of yore through the romantic lens of our era, Tinder, and offers the opportunity to finally swipe right (or left) on Jay Gatsby, Heathcliff, and Mr. Darcy.
“I wanted to give these women in my stories passion, desire, sensuality. They’re humans, not temples.” Nicole Dennis-Benn on resisting tropes about women in her second novel, Patsy. (Rumpus)
At Fanzine, Ariana Reines talks to fellow poet and astrologer Emmalea Russo about time travel, cosmic diagrams, and Reines’s new poetry collection, A Sand Book.
“Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by ghosts.” The letter-writing romance between Anne Sexton and her unlikely muse: a Benedictine monk. (Literary Hub)
At the New Yorker, translator Robert Chandler describes working with wife, Elizabeth Chandler, to revive Stalingrad, Vasily Grossman’s prequel to his epic novel Life and Fate. The novel had been largely forgotten due to the censorship Grossman faced in the Soviet Union.
“I realized that if I’m trying to explain what poetry is and why to read it, those are the wrong questions.” Poet and critic Stephanie Burt on the impetus behind her recently released book, Don’t Read Poetry. (Forward)
With Pride Week around the corner, Mental Floss recommends twenty-six books by LGBTQ+ authors, including Danez Smith’s debut poetry collection, [insert] boy, and Alexander Chee’s novel The Queen of the Night.
And Kristen Arnett talks to the Los Angeles Review of Books about treating Florida as a character in her debut novel, Mostly Dead Things. “When I was writing the book, I wanted readers to think they could put their hand on a page and feel the humidity.”
