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:
Elle previews the twenty-seven most anticipated books of the fall, including novels by Jennifer Egan and Jesmyn Ward, memoirs by Hillary Clinton and Ellen Pao, and essay collections by Ta-Nehisi Coates and the late Oliver Sacks.
“When you are writing a song, your space is vast, but it’s not infinite. Whereas fiction really is infinite.” John Darnielle, the singer-songwriter for the Mountain Goats, talks with the Independent about writing songs versus fiction, his love of eighteenth-century English novelists, and his second novel, Universal Harvester, which was published earlier this year.
After facing intense backlash from the scholarly community for complying with the Chinese government’s request to remove hundreds of academic articles on its website, Cambridge University Press has restored access to the articles, most of which deal with politically sensitive topics like Tibet and the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. (Guardian)
The Village Voice, a New York City–based alt-weekly founded in 1955, is shutting down its weekly print edition and going fully online. (Vulture)
“The myth of Russia as a racial paradise was perhaps one of its best, both as a muse to black artists across the diaspora and as a strategic tool in the African-American fight for political recognition.” Jennifer Wilson describes the pre-war relationship between artists of the Harlem Renaissance and the Soviet Union. (New York Times)
Nook Press, which is owned by Barnes & Noble, has taken down numerous titles and terminated the accounts of many self-published authors this week in light of its updated content policy, which states that titles subject to removal include “works portraying or encouraging incest, rape, bestiality, necrophilia, pedophilia or content that encourages hate or violence.” (Publishers Weekly)
Jon Meacham looks back on books by Robert Penn Warren, Maya Angelou, and Richard Wright, and how these books illuminate the realities of segregation in the South during the forties and fifties. (New York Times)
Writer Rachel Khong talks with the Millions about her debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin; writing about memory and illness; and how revising the novel was the “gentle layering and layering on of emotions.”
