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:
Swedish prosecutors have charged French photographer Jean-Claude Arnault with two counts of rape. Arnault is at the center of the recent scandal surrounding the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Prize in Literature that resulted in the cancellation of the 2018 prize. (Guardian)
In advance of the World Cup starting on Thursday, My Poetic Side has created a Poetry World Cup, which will feature matchups between the countries’ most famed poets. Russia’s Boris Pasternak will face off against Saudi Arabia’s Ghazi Abdul Rahman Al Gosaibi in the first match on Thursday.
“I wanted to illustrate how odd the people who believe they are ordinary or normal are.” Motoko Rich profiles Japanese novelist Sayaka Murata, whose tenth novel, Convenience Store Woman, will be her first title translated into English. (New York Times)
Penguin Random House and Netflix have teamed up to release a series of books, including original novels, inspired by the television show Stranger Things. The first novel, written by Gwenda Bond, will be released in Spring 2019. (Deadline)
English PEN has awarded Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie the PEN Pinter Prize, given annually to a writer who shows a “fierce intellectual determination… to define the real truth of our lives and our societies.” The judges cited Adichie’s “refusal to be deterred or detained by the categories of others.” (Guardian)
For its annual summer reader poll, NPR has invited readers to share which horror books scared them the most. NPR will later share the top hundred titles that will “keep your spine chilled and your teeth rattling no matter how hot this summer gets.”
Atlas Obscura investigates the practice of binding books with the pages of other books and looks at some notable examples, including a copy of a fifteenth-century book by Portuguese preacher Sebastião Barradas that was bound with a page from a tenth-century book of Saint Augustine’s sermons.
The Rumpus editors share the books they’re most excited to read in the second half of 2018.
