Privilege and Publishing, Magna Carta Turns Eight Hundred, and More

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:

Earlier this month, poet Elisa Gabbert wrote an advice column for Electric Literature with the title “Should White Men Stop Writing?” The article sparked heated online debates about the nature of privilege and publishing. At Vulture, Gabbert talks about the various reactions to her column, the politicization of the literary world, and more.

Speaking of writers causing social media storms, best-selling author Matt Haig found himself pegged as anti-feminist after posting on Twitter that his next nonfiction book could be about the perils of masculinity. (Guardian)

Today marks the eight hundredth anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta. At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Stephen Rohde considers four new books on the history of the document that became the basis for constitutional democracy.

At a Christie’s auction on Friday, six letters written by novelist Harper Lee failed to sell. The letters, which Lee wrote to a friend while writing To Kill a Mockingbird, were expected to fetch up to $250,000, and the bidding stopped at $90,000. The auction was deliberately timed to take place one month prior to the publication of Lee’s highly anticipated novel Go Set a Watchman. (New York Times)

“I cannot speak on behalf of women who write in other Indian languages, but the degree of hostility a woman writer faces is usually in inverse proportion to the extent of women’s personal and social freedoms.” Annie Zaidi, writer and editor of Unbound: 2,000 Years of Indian Women’s Writing, discusses the process and importance of putting together an anthology that aids in understanding women’s history in India. (Scroll.in)

Jonathan Franzen’s BookExpo America interview with critic Laura Miller, in which the author talks about his forthcoming novel Purity, is up at Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s Work in Progress blog.

American Library Association (ALA) president Courtney Young recently issued a statement questioning a new Congressional proposal to establish the United States Copyright office as its own independent agency. Young said the proposed bill, which was pitched as a way to “modernize” the Copyright Office, “does not address the longstanding problems facing the agency….Instead of independent authority, the Copyright Office needs resources—both in the form of funding and technical expertise—to bring it out of the typewriter age.” (Publishers Weekly)