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:
The American Booksellers Association announced that best-selling author Cheryl Strayed is this year’s official spokesperson for Indies First, a program in which authors hand-sell books at local independent bookstores during Small Business Saturday on November 28.
The longlist for the National Book Award in fiction was announced this morning. Among the ten finalists are Bill Clegg’s Did You Ever Have a Family, Nell Zink’s Mislaid, T. Geronimo Johnson’s Welcome to Braggsville, and Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House.
At Publishers Weekly, poet Mira Gonzalez talks about the goals she hopes to achieve by writing poetry, and the crossover of art and social media. “The rise of the Internet, especially Twitter, has created an attention span that happens to be perfect for the length and form of poetry.”
Meanwhile, acclaimed authors including Margaret Atwood, Philip Pullman, and David Mitchell have embraced social media and now post their works-in-progress on Twitter. Olivia Goldhill reports for the Atlantic on the rise of #TwitterFiction.
Award-winning author Salman Rushdie, whose most recent novel is Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, shares which books are currently on his nightstand, the genres he avoids, and the Enlightenment writers that helped him get through the nine years he lived in hiding under the fatwa. (New York Times)
“[Making art about grief] meant freedom from searching for the ‘right’ way to respond to loss.” Writer Kristi DiLallo explains how she learned the ways in which to express grief through writing. (Guernica)
The New York Times has hired Jennifer Senior as a new daily book critic. Senior—a nonfiction writer and contributing editor at New York Magazine—will replace Janet Maslin, the publication’s longtime critic who left the full-time position in May.
