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:
Colin Kaepernick has reportedly signed a million-dollar book deal with Random House’s One World imprint, which is run by editor Chris Jackson and has published titles by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jay-Z. Kaepernick is the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who knelt during the national anthem in support of Black Lives Matter, igniting a broader movement of players taking a knee during the national anthem. (Page Six)
Meanwhile, in Rome: The Lazio soccer team wore shirts with images of Anne Frank, handed out copies of her diary to fans, and played passages of her diary over the loudspeakers during a game on Wednesday. The efforts were a response to and apology for a group of Lazio fans deriding fans of rival team Roma with anti-Semitic slogans and images on Sunday. (Los Angeles Times)
The New Yorker chronicles Mark Twain’s many attempts to strike it rich, including squatting in a forest in an attempt to claim its timber rights, investing in everything from a typesetting machine to a German powdered food supplement, and inventing items such as men’s pants that “hung more gracefully,” hat pins, and a “baby-bed clamp.”
Filipino American artists Emmy Catedral and PJ Gubatina Policarpio have launched a mobile pop-up library of Filipino American literature in the Queens neighborhood of New York City. The artists formed the library to open up “a whole world of text by Filipinx writers—to find those private spaces, to stumble upon them, to read them, or just have conversations about them.” (Open City Magazine)
At the BBC, Benjamin Ramm speculates on why tyrants such as Nero, Stalin, Hitler, and Bin Laden were all fans and writers of poetry.
After finding all of her adolescent diaries that she thought she threw out, Anna Fels considers the meaning of one’s possessions. (New York Times)
An antiquarian bookseller in Dorset, England, has found a rare copy of a manuscript written by Edward Fairfax, detailing the trial he brought in 1621 against six local women in Fewston, North Yorkshire. Fairfax accused the women of bewitching his three daughters and killing the youngest. (Guardian)
“Clothing delivery services seem somehow dystopian, and although I was freaked out by them, I didn’t fully understand why.” Writers Emily Gould and Rumaan Alam try out different clothing subscription services. (New York Times)
