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:
Two bookstores in New York City face closure: Word Up (Manhattan Times); and Hue-Man Bookstore (Polite on Society).
Author Suw Charman-Anderson chats with other writers about cringe-inducing early work, and advises: "If there’s a common flaw in self-publishing, it’s that too many books are published too soon." (Forbes)
In an effort to build relationships with savvy readers, beginning this fall, Simon & Schuster will add QR codes to all its hardcover and trade paperback book covers. (paidContent)
The International Herald Tribune has more on the cultural preamble to the Olympic Games, the United Kindom's Poetry Parnassus.
Newly appointed United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey is at work on a memoir detailing her life growing up in 1970s Mississippi as a daughter of black mother and a white father. (In 1966, when Trethewey was born, anti-miscegenation laws were still in place.) The book recently sold to Daniel Halpern at Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, for publication in 2014. (Boston Globe)
Poet Simon Armitage, testing people's love of poetry as well as his own celebrity, walked over two hundred miles across the United Kingdom exchanging poetry readings for food and shelter. (BBC)
Author Michael Chabon describes his long, and sometimes fraught relationship with the work of James Joyce. (New York Review of Books)
The Paris Ritz, favored by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and scores of the well heeled, is about to undergo a two-year renovation—Vanity Fair reflects on its legendary history.
Jason Diamond is reading Dave Hill's Tasteful Nudes; Sasha Frere-Jones suggests Joe LeSueur's Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara; Marcy Dermansky recommends Miranda July's It Chooses You—the Atlantic Wire asks smart writers what books you should take to the beach this summer.
