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:
Hulu isn’t the only TV producer to tap into the surging popularity of Margaret Atwood—Netflix will release an adaptation of Atwood’s 1996 novel, Alias Grace, in the fall. The miniseries will star Anna Paquin and Sarah Gadon. (Huffington Post)
“For those of us who are marginalized people, creative writing—storytelling, prose, poetry—these are our history books, because we’re left out of history.” Bao Phi talks with Minneapolis Public Radio about how he came to poetry and his experiences as a Vietnamese immigrant in Minneapolis during the seventies.
Ian Buruma has been named the new editor of the New York Review of Books. A longtime contributor to the review, Buruma succeeds founding editor Robert B. Silvers, who died in March.“Art at its best, like sex at its best, is an invitation into God-knows-where. This is why they get along so well.”
Writer Eimear McBride argues for the importance of sex in literature and why good sex scenes are difficult to write. (Guardian)
Jon Clinch, whose debut novel, Finn, came out in 2007, writes about “courting the death sentence” in publishing—Clinch asked his publisher, Random House, to declare his book out of print and return the rights to him after sales dwindled. Clinch is self-publishing an expanded tenth-anniversary edition of the title. (Washington Post)
Alexander Nazaryan describes his experience listening to the thirty-hour recording of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Mason & Dixon on cassette tape, and how much of the “overstuffed postmodern novel” might have become as obsolete as the tape. (New York Times)
Kristen Tracy has won the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson First Book Award, a $10,000 prize given occasionally to a poet over the age of forty who has not published a book. Tracy’s winning manuscript, Half-Hazard, will be published by Graywolf Press in 2018.
Porochista Khakpour offers an essay on how to write Iranian-America, and about being asked repeatedly by editors to write personal essays about her experience as an Iranian-American. (Catapult)
