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:
A portion of three unpublished chapters from The Autobiography of Malcolm X was put up for auction yesterday. The chapters were originally cut in 1965 because they were deemed too incendiary. A private collector purchased the unpublished material, as well as a marked-up manuscript of the final book, in 1992 and has since allowed only one scholar fifteen minutes with the material. (New York Times)
Atlas Obscura visits Ellen G. K. Rubin—also known as the “Popuplady”—and her collection of more than 9,000 pop-up and movable books.
“When people ask me why I returned home to Mississippi after years of living in the West, the East and the Midwest, I simply say this: I moved home because I love the beauty of the place, and I love the people. But this is a toothless answer, as weak and harmless as a baby’s mouth.” Jesmyn Ward on why she returned to Mississippi. (TIME)
Publishers Weekly has released its picks for the most anticipated books of Fall 2018.
“I delight in her wit and intelligence, and find her criminally underappreciated by bookish people, perhaps because she is subtle, and because her light beams outward into the world, not back to illuminate herself. She shows us the many ways of being a human, if we could only look harder and love more deeply all that we’re seeing.” Lauren Groff writes in praise of critic and fiction writer Elizabeth Hardwick. (New York Times)
The Society of Authors, a U.K. trade union for writers, has criticized the indie press Eyewear Publishing for sending its poets contracts that “constitute an unwarranted interference with their civil rights.” (Bookseller)
Debut novelist Ingrid Rojas Contreras talks with the Rumpus about her writing process, growing up in Colombia, and her debut novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, which comes out next week from Doubleday.
“I hate to break it to you but everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them…. Every story is not a book.” Literary agent Kate McKean on what it takes to write a book. (Outline)
