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 2017 Man Booker Prize longlist was announced yesterday. The thirteen-author list includes Arundhati Roy, Zadie Smith, Paul Auster, George Saunders, Mohsin Hamid, and Colson Whitehead. The annual £50,000 prize is given for a book of fiction published in the previous year; the shortlist will be announced in September, the winner in October.
Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and incoming poet laureate Tracy K. Smith join CBS This Morning to talk about making poetry accessible and exciting. “I think poems are good at closing distances and making us feel like we’ve come into contact with something,” says Smith.
“It’s can be a way of reaffirming contact with the self—and then, more radically, finding within its enclosure a more idiosyncratic, more personal way of marking and possessing time before it has its way with us.” New York Times Book Review critic Parul Sehgal considers the writer’s diary as an effort to wrestle with time.
“Kingsnorth makes a perplexing example of what an ‘uncivilized’ novelist should be. Perhaps some dissonance is baked into the proposition; was there ever a literary form more civilized, more bourgeois, than the novel?” At Slate, Laura Miller considers the work of Paul Kingsnorth, the British novelist and leader of the Dark Mountain Project, which asserts that mainstream environmentalism is delusional since civilization is already doomed.
Parul Sehgal and Laura Miller are both featured in the Poets & Writers Magazine “Reviewers & Critics” series, where critics discuss their work, approach, and careers.
At the New Yorker, Abby Aguirre argues that the most apt dystopian novel to describe the current times is not Orwell’s 1984 or Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, but Octavia Butler’s Parable novels.
“Writing for me is like very elegant shitting. It’s involuntary. It just comes out of me. It’s how I get through the day.” Sarah Gerard talks with the Creative Independent about writing habits, understanding your subject, and her new essay collection, Sunshine State.
Lauren Bender, the editor of Mud Season Review, talks about what the journal is looking for, a day in the life of an editor, and the differences between print and online lit mags. (Review Review)
“Optimism has to be grounded on actual possibilities. When I think about what it means to be an optimist, I think about the work that can happen and the bonds that can happen when I commit to this work.” Ocean Vuong talks with Literary Hub while on tour in Milan promoting the Italian translation of his debut poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds.
