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:
Today is the opening ceremony for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. To mark the occasion, the Los Angeles Review of Books launches a series of poets and poet-critics on sports and poetry.
Salon publishes an essay by Abby Mims, which originally appeared on The Nervous Breakdown, about wrestling with writerly envy and what happens when your number-one literary nemesis (in this case Joshua Ferris) achieves wild success.
Over at the Kenyon Review, Jake Adam York develops a classification system for book blurbs in his “Field Guide to North American Blurbs.” Groupings include the “Lavish,” the “Drunk on the Wine Within,” and “Phantom Blurbs.”
“Go, said his soul to a poet.” The New York Public Library publishes a scan of a Walt Whitman manuscript on its Tumblr site.
Melville House's Dennis Johnson blogs about Brian Howard’s revelatory story in Book Business magazine about how e-books sales are inextricably linked to bricks-and-mortar stores, and what the closing of so many stores could mean for publishing.
Start the weekend right with a dose of advice from great authors: Check out Open Culture's extremely rare video footage of Rudyard Kipling on truth in writing. Then head over to Asian American Writers Workshop's website to watch Junot Diaz and Min Jin Lee share their two cents on the writer's journey: “You haven’t done anything wrong. Didn’t take an MFA? You didn’t do anything wrong. Took eleven years to write your first book? You didn’t do anything wrong. Don’t feel like writing about your family? You didn’t do anything wrong. Feel like writing about your family? You didn’t do anything wrong.”
