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 Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas in Austin has been granted an award to digitize more than 24,000 pages from the Gabriel García Márquez archive. The eighteen-month digitization project, titled “Sharing ‘Gabo’ With the World: Building the Gabriel García Márquez Online Archive From His Papers at the Harry Ransom Center,” will begin in June. The Nobel Prize–winning author’s archive contains material dating from 1950 to 2013.
Over the course of this year, to mark the four hundredth anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, eighteen of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s First Folios will make tour stops in all fifty states. (NPR)
At the Atlantic, writer Koa Beck praises novels released in 2015 that featured “unlikeable” but complex women protagonists, citing examples from Lauren Groff’s Fates & Furies and Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train.
Speaking of The Girl on the Train, Word & Film looks ahead to the most anticipated movie adaptations in 2016.
The National Book Critics Circle has released the results of its election to fill eight spots on its twenty-four-member board. The new board members will serve three-year terms.
New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul answers frequently asked questions about the review, including how one becomes a book reviewer, whether a completely objective review can exist, and the function of negative reviews. (New York Times)
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg reflects on his Facebook reading group A Year of Books, in which he read and discussed one book a month. Zuckerberg’s selections included Eula Biss’s acclaimed On Immunity and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. (GalleyCat)
At the Virginia Quarterly Review, Suzanne Koven—physician and writer-in-residence at the Massachusetts General Hospital—examines the usefulness of the illness and medical memoir, and the challenges these memoirists face, including the “uphill climb to literary respectability faced by all memoirists.”
