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:
Vanity Fair profiles publisher Nan Talese and her rise to success in the publishing world, her unconventional marriage to “iconic charmer” Gay Talese, and her editorial acumen in working with writers such as Margaret Atwood, the late Pat Conroy, and Ian McEwan.
For several months the Wild Detectives, a Dallas bookstore, has been trolling people into reading classic novels by posting clickbait on its social media pages. The bookstore has created “litbait,” or fake articles that when clicked on lead to the full text of a classic novel. “You’ll never guess what happened to this Kansas teen after a tornado destroys her home,” leads to The Wizard of Oz, and “British Guy Dies After Selfie Gone Wrong,” leads to The Picture of Dorian Gray. (CNN)
This weekend in Stockholm, Bob Dylan will finally accept the Nobel Prize for Literature from the Swedish Academy. In an unprecedented decision, the Academy awarded Dylan the prize in October, making him the first singer-songwriter to receive the award. Dylan took two weeks to publicly respond to the announcement, did not appear at the Nobel ceremony in December, and has yet to deliver the lecture required to receive the prize. (BBC News)
The University of Rochester has acquired a trove of letters between dozens of suffragettes, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, that “sheds light on a contentious period within the suffrage movement, while underscoring the degree to which the movement was driven by complex networks of on-the-ground activists.” (New York Times)
Ben Lerner considers the work of Australian writer Gerald Murnane and his “matter-of-factness, often approaching coldness, with an intricate lyricism” in depicting Australia and its landscape and art. (New Yorker)
Split This Rock has awarded its Freedom Plow Award for Poetry and Activism to poet Christopher Soto, who in an interview on the organization’s blog says, “I want to name the harm by the state and then I want to help people imagine justice outside of the states retributive violence.”
With a $195,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Texas in Austin will embark on a two-year project to digitize and open the archives of PEN International and English PEN. The archives will include more than a hundred thousand documents from 1912 to 2008 concerned with writers’ efforts to defend free speech and protect human rights. (Publishers Weekly)
