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.
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely / the world offers itself to your imagination, / calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — /over and over announcing your place / in the family of things.” Mary Oliver, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet whose odes to nature garnered critical and popular acclaim, has died. She was 83. (New York Times)
Atria Books has launched Signal Press, a new imprint headed by Julia Cheiffetz. The imprint will publish books addressing feminism, politics, and social justice. (Publishers Weekly)
“By the time I was done, I was like, ‘Wow, I never want to do that again!’” Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties, encountered a newly personal—and painful—experience in writing her forthcoming memoir, In the Dream House. (Entertainment Weekly)
While American publishers saw revenue from adult fiction fall by 16 percent between 2013 and 2017, the Wall Street Journal reports on how Amazon is rewriting the publishing industry by getting into—and owning—the game.
More than one hundred and sixty years after Flaubert delivered to readers a yearning and dynamic Emma Bovary, books about irredeemably villainous women have flooded the market. “Unfortunately, many of these psychos are one-dimensional—angry women without a shred of complexity, cardboard storyboards for the inevitable film adaptation,” Hillary Kelly writes. (Vulture)
Meanwhile, Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure, explains that recent novels by women are lumped under a similarly reductive umbrella. “We need a wider range of language to describe these books instead of writing them off as angry feminist dystopia.” (BOMB)
“I found myself leaning toward looking back with tenderness on my own history even if that history was painful.” Poet Emily Jungmin Yoon on research, responsibility, and finding sweetness in memory. (Paris Review)
Sherrilyn Kenyon, the fantasy novelist known for her best-selling “Dark-Hunter” novels, has accused her estranged husband of poisoning her. A sheriff’s department in Tennessee is investigating. (Los Angeles Times)
In New York City, Poets House has announced a new Chapbook Digitization Project, which will allow digital visitors to access the organization's chapbook collection, one of the largest in the United States.
