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:
Last week, Open Road Media published seventeen digital collections of John Ashbery’s poetry, marking the first time the poet’s work has been made widely available in e-book format. Previously, Ashbery and his publisher, Ecco, had the poet’s work pulled from all digital editions, as the format significantly altered the original structure of his poems. Open Road and other publishers have been working to improve such ubiquitous flaws in electronic poetry publishing, in an effort to more accurately maintain the line breaks, stanzas, and overall architecture of digitally rendered poems. (New York Times)
A United Kingdom–based charity organization called Create has launched a new literary project called “Inside Stories,” whose mission is to team professional artists with incarcerated individuals to write, design, and construct children’s books. (GalleyCat)
In the latest attempt to end the months-long dispute between Amazon and Hachette, the group Authors United—which is comprised of over a thousand writers, many of whom are Hachette authors—has written directly to Amazon’s board. In the letter, which was posted online this morning, Authors United wrote, “Efforts to impede or block the sale of books have a long and ugly history. Do you, personally, want to be associated with this?” Amazon has been removing preorder buttons and delaying shipments of Hachette titles as part of its ongoing battle over e-book pricing. (New York Times)
Peet van Zyl, the manager of South African track star Oscar Pistorius, has denied suggestions that Pistorius will write a memoir about the 2013 shooting death of his girlfriend. Pistorius, a double amputee who participated in the 2012 Olympics, was convicted of culpable homicide in the murder case, and will be sentenced next month. (NPR)
As Scotland prepares for an upcoming independence vote, a three-hundred-year-old poem in support of the British union has gone on sale. (Guardian)
At the Atlantic, novelist Edan Lepucki, whose dystopian novel, California, was published in July, looks to the subversive metaphors in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale for lessons in channeling the weird and rebellious spirits of her characters.
“The mind is a beast in itself: Like the body, it needs time and space to roam. In cordoning it off, we run the risk of alienating ourselves from the miraculous absurdity of life itself. We forget how to wonder, to drift. We forget that most questions in this world—the ones that really matter—are impossible to answer completely.” At the Millions, Chloe Benjamin considers the relationship between writing fiction and dreaming.
