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:
After a prolonged bidding war, Penguin Random House has acquired books by former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. The Financial Times reports that the two books, which are likely to be published in 2018, together sold for more than $60 million. (CNN)
Yale University has announced the eight recipients of the 2017 Windham-Campbell Prizes, given annually to poets, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and playwrights. The winners, who each receive $165,000, include poet Carolyn Forché, fiction writer Erna Brodber, and nonfiction writer Maya Jasanoff.
At the Rumpus, Leigh Stein interviews Melissa Febos about addiction, writing through fear, confession versus secrecy, and Febos’s new essay collection, Abandon Me, which came out yesterday from Bloomsbury. The book also appears in the latest installment of Poets & Writers Magazine’s Page One column, which includes original audio of the author reading an excerpt from the book.
In response to Simon & Schuster’s recently canceled book deal with far-right conservative Milo Yiannopoulos—and writer Roxane Gay’s decision to pull her book from the publisher—the Review Review asks nine literary magazine editors: Does hate speech ever deserve a literary platform?
“I want to write. I want to write in my notebook. I want to write projects, but this life of being rejected is not for me. I can’t handle it and I don’t want it to distort my sense of the project of literature, in both reading and writing, which is this love of my life.” Writer Kate Zambreno talks about the struggle to find a publisher for her genre-defying The Book of Mutter, published in December by Semiotext(e). (Creative Independent)
Speaking of dealing with rejection, McSweeney’s offers some “advice” for submitting to literary magazines in a dystopia: “Would reading it aloud distract the foot soldiers coming to arrest me long enough to come up with an escape plan?”
From anagram to stutter rhyme, Dora Malech talks with poets Randall Mann, Richie Hofmann, Phillip B. Williams, and Chen Chen about how they adapt and use formal constraints in their work. (Kenyon Review)
