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:
Oprah has announced Imbolo Mbue’s debut novel, Behold the Dreamers, as the next pick for her book club. “It's everything our culture is grappling with right now, at least many of the things about race and class, about the economy, immigration, the dangers of us versus them mentality,” said Oprah in her announcement on CBS This Morning.
Read and listen to an excerpt of Mbue’s novel in “First Fiction 2016,” last year’s installment of the Poets & Writers Magazine annual feature of debut novelists.
The New York Times offers a timeline of twenty years of LGBTQ literature, from Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues to Édouard Louis’s novel The End of Eddy.
The Transportation Security Administration is testing out a new policy where airport travelers would have to remove their books and other paper goods while going through security. The American Civil Liberties Union has raised concerns that the new policy would violate travelers' privacy. (Hill, ACLU)
The Guardian celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the first Harry Potter book and recalls the craze the series inspired, from bookstores holding midnight release parties, to churches burning the books for promoting witchcraft, to A. S. Byatt penning a withering review of the series in the New York Times.
The American Library Association awarded its Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction to Colson Whitehead and Matthew Desmond. Whitehead won in fiction for his novel The Underground Railroad; Desmond won in nonfiction for his book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. (Publishers Weekly)
“My primary power is for the weird brown kid who gets to know that they’re not alone.” Sherman Alexie talks with BuzzFeed News about his new memoir about his mother, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, and writing work that defies expectations.
“Feminist dystopias, long established in a shady nook of the publishing industry, are now out there shaping the zeitgeist.” Vanessa Thorpe considers the growing prevalence of the feminist dystopian novel, in light of the television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Naomi Alderman’s win of the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction for her novel The Power. (Guardian)
Tracy K. Smith, who was recently announced as the country’s next poet laureate, recommends four poetry collections to read. (Poets & Writers, PBS NewsHour)
