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:
“Am I funny? Writing gives me no happiness. I’ve said this before.” At Vice, fiction writer Joy Williams talks about the various dark and humorous approaches to religion in her latest story collection, Ninety-Nine Stories of God, out now from Tin House.
“The social personality is really irrelevant to what makes the writer. When you’re in isolation, in quiet, often in the middle of the night, away from the exigencies of life, which you can never escape from for very long, that is when your mind is freest and most on fire.” Cynthia Ozick meditates on criticism, life versus literature, and the essay. (Los Angeles Times)
Bookstores across the world will host release parties this Saturday night for the publication of Jack Thorne and J. K. Rowling’s play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The play, which picks up the tale of Rowling’s famous boy wizard nineteen years after the events of the last novel, has premiered to positive reviews in London. (Guardian)
“Poetry is a very oral art. It is meant to be read as though you are speaking it out loud to yourself. That is where the fun is. It does not make a difference whether the profanity is being used to express anger or playfulness, for profanity, when used, is always being a little disruptive to the norms of poetry. That’s the poetic value.” Scholar Michael Adams muses on the current golden age of profanity, and how it relates to poetry. (Boston Globe)
Dictionary.com has added three hundred new entries this month including “woke,” “Pokemon,” “d-bag,” and “cisgender.” To help determine which words should be added each year, the website’s editorial staff analyzes what words are looked up most frequently. (TIME)
As part of its effort to digitize and make public its eighty thousand documents, the Vatican Apostolic Library has digitized an illustrated portion of Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid that is sixteen hundred years old. (Guardian)
“Most of the talk about diverse voices not being included in literature revolves around what the white-dominated publishing industry isn’t doing. I’m personally way more concerned that our parents’ generation actively discourages artistic pursuits, and that tomorrow’s Asian American writers are being pressured into becoming doctors, lawyers, and bankers instead.” At the Margins, Leland Cheuk talks with fellow debut novelist YiShun Lai about writing endings, grappling with Asian American stereotypes, and the future of Asian American literature.
Audiobooks are on the rise, with a 21 percent increase in sales in 2015 from the previous year. Publishers are taking note and expanding their audiobook catalogue, as well as releasing more audiobooks performed by celebrities. (Wall Street Journal)
Publishers Weekly looks ahead to the most anticipated books of Fall 2016, selected from a group of more than fourteen thousand titles.
