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 responsibility of the serious American reader is to look beyond the mainstream, the comfort zone, and to embrace the risk associated with discovering quality, original literary works about other cultures and lives.” At Full Stop, writer Matt Bucher examines the legacy of Roberto Bolaño and the state of Latin American literature in translation. “Now that Bolaño no longer needs a critic to champion him to an English audience, which Latino writers do need champions?”
For better or worse, reporter Hart Seely has transformed the speeches, interviews, ramblings, and tweets of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump into a collection of poetry that publisher HarperCollins says, “will delight, shock, and entertain you.” Seely has not changed any of the Donald’s words, and has culled them from over three decades of material. Here’s a sample poem: “Nabisco. Nabisco! Oreos! Right? / Oreos! I love Oreos! // I’ll never eat them again. OK? / I’ll never eat them again. // No… Nabisco.” The Bard of the Deal hits bookstores December 15. (Guardian)
At the New Statesman, Philip Hoare examines how the geography of London inspired Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. “Late at night, [Melville] ‘turned flukes’ down Oxford Street as if he were being followed by a great whale, and thought he saw ‘blubber rooms’ in the butcheries of the Fleet Market. And when he saw Queen Victoria riding past in a carriage, he joked that the young man sitting beside her was the Prince of Whales."
The Boston Globe reports on the circumstances surrounding publications by brand-name deceased authors, and the high profitability of posthumous publications from authors including Stieg Larsson, Robert Parker, and David Foster Wallace.
A seventeenth-century book-length biography of the earliest known African woman has been translated into English for the first time. Walatta Petros was an Ethiopian saint who lived from 1592 to 1642. Her disciples wrote her biography in the Gəˁəz language after her death in 1672, and Princeton University professor Wendy Laura Belcher translated and edited the English version from the Gəˁəz. Princeton University Press has published Belcher’s translation as The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros. (Guardian)
The Japan Library Association criticized the Kobe Shimbun newspaper after it published the titles of books that best-selling novelist Haruki Murakami checked out of his high school library when he was a teenager. (Los Angeles Times)
In some middle school English classrooms throughout the country, teachers encourage their students to stop using words like “said,” and instead replace them with “richer” and more expressive words like “proclaimed.” “The goal is livelier writing,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “The result can be confusion.” A writer responds at Slate with a plea in favor of just saying “said.”
