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:
John Green will publish his next novel with Penguin in October. Turtles All the Way Down, a young-adult novel, will tell the story of a teenager investigating the disappearance of a billionaire while coping with mental illness. It will be Green’s first novel in five years, since the publication of The Fault in Our Stars, which sold twenty-three million copies. (Publishers Weekly)
Emma Watson hid free copies of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale with handwritten notes around Paris this week as part of an initiative with the international organization the Book Fairies. Watson also hid copies of Maya Angelou’s Mom & Me & Mom in the London underground last November. (CNN, Poets & Writers)
Readers who purchased an e-book from a major publisher through iBooks, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Kobo between April 2010 and May 21, 2012, may have credits for each title purchased—but they expire on Saturday. The credits are part of a payback to consumers after a class-action lawsuit found Apple and the five major publishing houses guilty of colluding to raise e-book prices. (Los Angeles Times)
“These works are an outlet for grief, but also part of what has become an obligation for black families to mourn in public.” Mychal Denzel Smith considers books written by the families of Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown, and the unique pressure those families face to explain and publicize their grief. (New Republic)
Jamie James revisits Norman Douglas’s 1917 novel, South Wind, which despite its great popularity upon release has been largely forgotten and tarnished by Douglas’s tumultuous personal life. (New Yorker)
“We need to keep perspective, kindle our outrage but not let it destroy us. This is no easy feat, but plenty of artists have lived through oppressive regimes and continued to make great art because of or despite their surroundings. Outrage and raw emotion can certainly drive the artistic spirit.” Novelist Heidi Pitlor, who is also the editor of the Best American Short Stories series, talks art and politics. (Ploughshares)
Several prominent novelists, including Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ian McEwan, have composed handwritten homages to Jane Austen that are being auctioned off by the Royal Society of Literature. Some novelists praised Austen’s style, while others, like Ian Rankin and Atwood, offer some criticism of the famed writer. (Guardian)
In the latest installment of the New York Times By the Book, Emma Straub, novelist and owner of the recently opened Brooklyn bookstore Books Are Magic, shares which books she would “snatch off a windowsill faster than a cooling apple pie,” or “put a gold, shiny GREAT sticker on without hesitation.
