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:
“They also use the devices of poetry—interruption, compression, extended metaphor—to pay book-length attention to individual real lives, and, not coincidentally, they come from independent publishers known for their poets and poems.” Steph Burt takes a look at a new crop of memoirs that are reinventing the form and borrowing techniques from poetry. (New Yorker)
Publishing industry veterans Emily Cook and Richard Nash have launched a marketing and publicity company, Cursor Marketing Services, for international publishers distributing in the United States. Cook is the former marketing and publicity director at Milkweed Editions; Nash formerly ran Soft Skull Press and the website Small Demons. (Publishers Weekly)
Literary Hub rounds up advice for writers from authors including Jim Shepard, Katie Kitamura, Michael Chabon, and Lindy West, who says, “Imagine that there’s a giant pit that’s opened up before you. And on the other side of the pit is the rest of your life. And all you have to do is just dump words into the pit until they fill it up and you can walk across.”
The Transportation Security Administration announced that it will no longer examine books separately at airport security, after announcing last month that the policy might be rolled out nation-wide. In the past month many academics and civil rights groups had criticized the policy, arguing that it was a violation of privacy. (Bustle)
“Nguyen’s books are almost overwhelming in their capacious embrace of a war that was so very, very big.” At the New Republic, Josephine Livingston profiles writer Viet Thanh Nguyen.
To help decode the three-thousand-year-old script on ancient oracle bones, the National Museum of Chinese Writing in Anyang, China, will reward translators $15,000 for every character they can successfully translate. (Atlas Obscura)
“Every time I hear one of my poems in another language, I instinctively step away a little bit, and enjoy them as if it was somebody else’s. It is like admiring the wrapping on a gift, when you already know what is inside.” Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku describes hearing her work translated, growing up in communist Albania, and resisting the idea of gendered literature. (Guernica)
“He may have also created a strange new entertainment category, one that hovers somewhere between fan fiction, role-playing games and literature—a novel set in a game, that can itself be played within the game.” The New York Times considers the blurring lines between games and literature in light of new novel by Max Brooks inspired by the game of the same name, Minecraft: The Island.
To read about games adapted from novels, check out “Video Games Redefine the Classics” in the latest issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
