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 collection of George Orwell’s poetry has been cleared for public sale, even though Owell’s estate fears that the “varied” quality of the poems might damage his literary reputation. Dione Venables, the collection’s editor and one of the founding members of the Orwell Society, said, “I can’t think of any poem that is downright bad, but there are quite a lot that are average.” (Independent)
At the New Republic, an academic reflects on John Williams’s 1965 novel, Stoner, and the lost world of higher education it describes. “Stoner, tragic figure though he is, finds something much described and more rarely seen: teaching as a vocation.” This month, New York Review Books is releasing a fiftieth anniversary edition of the novel.
PEN American Center has named fiction and nonfiction writer Roxane Gay the winner of its Freedom to Write award, a prize given to individuals who have “demonstrated exceptional courage in the defense of free expression.” (Guardian)
Philip Pullman’s fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials has already been adapted as a stage play and feature film, and is now set to be adapted as a television series for the first time. (Daily Mail)
“I am prepared to have a different kind of relationship with a poem. It’s very different than how I read tend to read nonfiction.” Poet Ross Gay shares his reading habits at the Boston Globe. Gay’s newest poetry collection, Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude, is a finalist for the National Book Award.
The tale of Orpheus and Eurydice remains a “timeless story of art’s place in trying to recover the dead.” Writers including Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Carroll, and Neil Gaiman recently contributed their interpretations of the Greek myth to the BBC Radio program Orpheus Underground. Read Gaiman’s poetic retelling of the myth, “Orphee.”
John Freeman, former editor of Granta and current editor of Freeman’s, offers a personal account of publishing the fiction of Lydia Davis. “What [Davis] was wasn’t a love junkie, but one of the greatest descriptive writers of consciousness in the last few decades.” (Electric Literature)
