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:
A new biography of late author Saul Bellow, The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, will be published in May. In advance of the biography’s release, Lee Siegel reflects on Bellow’s literary influence and controversial reputation. (Vulture)
“It’s impossible to overstate how my relationship to music forms a preserve for the esoteric or even spiritual aspect of my relationship to cultural stuff, to human expressivity…it’s a safe enclosure.” Jonathan Lethem and Ben Arthur talk with one another about their craft and the intersections of music and writing at the Believer.
The winner of the second annual Folio Prize for fiction was announced last night. Indian-American author Akhil Sharma received the £40,000 prize (approximately $60,000) for his semi-autobiographical novel Family Life. (Guardian)
Publishers Weekly provides practical advice and several platform options for writers looking to self-publish an audiobook.
“I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right.” In this week’s installment of the New York Times Bookends series, authors Thomas Mallon and Cheryl Strayed discuss the importance of both the writing and revising stages of their creative processes.
Several authors including Joanne Harris are criticizing a new app called Clean Reader. The app allows users to replace explicit words in e-books with “sanitized” versions, sometimes without authorial consent. (Telegraph)
“Poets tend to graduate from the particular to the abstract, moving from observable reality toward its clandestine laws: from daffodils to solitude, from waves and minutes to Time. Graham works in the opposite direction, moving down a steep slope from abstraction to concrete experience.” At the New Yorker, Dan Chiasson examines the work of acclaimed poet Jorie Graham, whose writing career spans nearly forty years.
