Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories.
Seven major publishing houses are suing the audiobook company Audible. The lawsuit filed by Chronicle Books, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Scholastic, and Simon & Schuster contends that the Amazon-owned company is violating copyright law with its planned speech-to-text feature. (NPR)
“Being a poet informs everything I experience and consume, because my approach to writing poetry has become a sense-making mechanism for my life and experiences.” Ariel Francisco talks to the Rumpus about yelling at Florida in his forthcoming poetry collection, A Sinking Ship Is Still a Ship.
At the New Yorker, Dan Chiasson contemplates the status of books in modern reading. “Far from embodying an arc of unbroken concentration, books have always mapped their readers’ agitation—not unlike the way a person’s browsing history might reveal a single day’s struggle, for example, to focus on writing a book review.”
“I think if you have the platform and the resources and the accessibility to help anybody out, it should be people that you want to see succeed along with you.” Poet, nonfiction writer, artist, and Sparkle Nation Book Club cofounder Diamond Stingily on the art of collaboration. (Creative Independent)
Critic Madeleine Schwartz considers the fiction of Nell Zink in the age of Trump, asking, “What happens to a satirist who sees her darkest visions made real?” (New Yorker)
“Through fiction, we can awaken to reality.” At Electric Literature, Melanie S. Hatter talks to Tyrese L. Coleman about confronting racism and gun violence in her new novel, Malawi’s Sisters.
In Brooklyn, New York, a nineteenth-century factory building has become a refuge for independent publishers. The Old American Can Factory is home to four small presses—Akashic Books, Archipelago Books, Restless Books, and Ugly Duckling Presse—as well as the literary magazine One Story. (Publishers Weekly)
“I want to go out as someone who kept to the truth.” Edna O’Brien chats with the Guardian about publishing her nineteenth novel, Girl, at age eighty-eight.
