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:
Looking for a hotel for holiday travel? The New York Times features an array of hotels for book lovers.
Bob Dylan will not attend the upcoming ceremony in Sweden to receive his Nobel Prize for Literature, but the Swedish Academy has announced that his speech will be read on his behalf. The academy also announced that musician and writer Patti Smith will perform Dylan’s song “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” at the ceremony as a tribute to Dylan. So far, the speech reader has not been named. (New York Times)
Matthew Zapruder urges America’s poets to write through our post-election fears and anxieties in order to preserve the free space of imagination, which he says is vital to our survival. “Whatever kind of poetry anyone writes, or whatever art we make, there is always time to do the necessary work of making our society better.” Zapruder will be participating in the Poets & Writers Live conference in San Francisco next month. (Literary Hub)
Poet Joanna C. Valente interviews creative nonfiction writer Janice Lee about her new essay collection, The Sky Isn’t Blue, as well as the music she listens to while writing, the books she has always identified with, and her apocalypse plans. (Civil Coping Mechanisms)
Meanwhile, poet Daniel Borzutzky talks about his National Book Award–winning collection The Performance of Becoming Human, and how its title evokes the Franz Kafka story “A Report to an Academy.” (Chicago Times)
Speaking of Kafka, according to Reiner Stach, a Franz Kafka academic and author of a three-volume biography of the author, Kafka’s fear of sex and physical contact was totally normal in society at the time. (Guardian)
Joshua Topolsky, founder of the website the Verge, has launched the Outline, a new site featuring cultural criticism and longform journalism optimized for mobile reading. Topolsky says the site aims to be “a next-generation version of the New Yorker.”
