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 death sentence placed on Palestinian poet and contemporary artist Ashraf Fayadh— who had been accused of blasphemy partly based on his poetry—has been revoked. Fayadh’s sentencing in November stirred international outrage among artists groups and human rights groups including PEN America. According to Fayadh’s lawyer, a Saudi court reduced the poet’s sentence from death to eight years in prison, eight hundred lashes, and public repentance. (Associated Press)
After opening its first brick-and-mortar bookstore in Seattle last November, Amazon is planning to open as many as four hundred more physical locations. (Wall Street Journal)
Director and producer Arwen Curry has launched a Kickstarter project to complete Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, her feature documentary about the writer’s work, life, and legacy. Curry has filmed the award-winning writer, now eighty-six, for the past seven years. “In the film,” the Kickstarter page states, “we’ll accompany Le Guin on an intimate journey of self-discovery as she comes into her own as a major feminist author, inspiring generations of women and other marginalized writers along the way.”
Do not envy the writer, pleads Ongoingness author Sarah Manguso. The real “purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair,” she writes. “If you keep that in mind always, the wish to make something beautiful or smart looks slight and vain in comparison. If people read your work and, as a result, choose life, then you are doing your job.” (New York Times)
Paul Aiken, longtime executive director of the Authors Guild, died last Friday, January 29, at age fifty-six. Aiken joined the guild in 1993 and was named executive director in 1995. One of Aiken’s roles as executive director was encouraging publishers to raise royalty rates on e-books. Aiken passed away after being diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) in 2013. (Publishers Weekly)
Over at the New Republic, fiction writer Alexander Chee—whose historical novel The Queen of the Night was released yesterday—considers the stigmas one may place on the genre of historical novels, and whether they can also be considered serious literature. “Historical fiction was not—and is not—meant to supplant literature from the period it describes,” Chee writes.
Slate book reviewer Katy Waldman comments on a new wave of self-loathing book trailers. “This is also self-deprecation in the service of something else: an awareness of the long-running tension between art and commerce.”
The magazine story is dead! Long live the magazine story! Read Evan Ratliff’s slightly adapted introduction to the Best American Magazine Writing 2015, which is available now. (Atavist)
