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:
Last night, the winners of the sixty-sixth National Book Awards were announced. Robin Coste Lewis won the poetry award for her collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus; Adam Johnson took home the fiction award for his story collection Fortune Smiles; Ta-Nehisi Coates won in nonfiction for Between the World and Me; and Neal Shusterman won in young people’s literature for Challenger Deep. Read more at the Grants & Awards Blog.
Meanwhile, some of the year’s most buzzed-about books have inexplicably divided the critics, including National Book Award finalists Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, and Jonathan Franzen’s Purity. (Wall Street Journal)
Speaking of big books, there appears to be a shift in literary publishing, with seven-figure advances once reserved for “promising debut thrillers or romance novels” now being offered to literary debuts. Says Jennifer Maloney at the WSJ: “Thanks to a spate of recent runaway hits such as The Goldfinch in 2013 and All the Light We Cannot See last year, publishers are increasingly willing to pony up enormous advances to secure potential blockbusters.”
“I think any poem, and any writer, is always breaking open the questions beneath the poem, or the writing.” Citizen author Claudia Rankine talks about writing as investigation, the usefulness of the MFA, engaging with various artistic mediums, and more. (Spectacle)
At the Atlantic, Paris Review editor Lorin Stein discusses the power of ambiguity in fiction, and how Denis Johnson’s story “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” prefigures some of the most interesting new writing he’s encountering today.
At Literary Hub, Rebecca Solnit attempts to put an end to the gender-locking of the notorious Esquire list that keeps “rising from the dead like a zombie to haunt the Internet”—“The 80 Best Books Every Man Should Read”—with her own list of “80 Books No Woman Should Read.”
“My Blake, the radical visionary poet of the 1960s, seems almost old fashioned now. I realize how many other Blakes there have been, both before and since.” At the New York Review of Books, Richard Holmes considers the various figurations of William Blake’s greatness.
