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 Poetry Foundation has partnered with the WFMT Radio Network to launch PoetryNow, a “short-form radio series and podcast that showcases established and emerging poets reading and discussing new poems.” The first episode of the biweekly series is available today and features Jericho Brown reading and discussing his poem “Herman Finley.”
“Merritt’s remarks clash with how the small, interlinked community of writers who make up the literary world discuss each other’s work publicly. (Privately is another matter!)” At Salon, Laura Miller considers why Stephin Merritt’s critiques of novels by Roxane Gay and Anthony Doerr during the Morning News’s Tournament of Books caused such uproar.
Speculations have arisen over yesterday’s Business Insider story by Jillian D’Onfro, who reported that HarperCollins may refuse to renew its contract with Amazon. Some industry members suspect that Amazon, whose CEO Jeff Bezos invests in Business Insider, is using the story “to turn up the heat on HC (HarperCollins) without resorting to the tactics it used last year against HBG (Hachette Book Group).” (Publishers Weekly)
Following the death of the world’s oldest person (a 117-year-old woman from Japan), NPR remembers poet and author Margaret Howe Freydberg, who died last week at the age of 107. Freydburg wrote and published well past her one hundredth birthday.
University of Georgia Press is set to launch a new literary nonfiction series called Crux. The first title of the series, Debra Monroe’s memoir My Unsentimental Education, will be published in October. (GalleyCat)
James Spaulding, a former manager of the Clarke University bookstore in Dubuque, Iowa, has been sentenced to four years in prison for creating a fake book wholesaler and embezzling over $300,000 from the university. (Gazette)
“The novel stumbles onwards, ineluctably, gorging and disgorging its own death, its own deadness. So the novel's not just dead—it's undead.” Over at BOMB, Frederic Tuten interviews British author Tom McCarthy, who recently published his fourth novel, Satin Island.
