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.
Publishers Weekly has announced its annual Best Books issue, which features the editors’ picks of the overall top ten books of the year, as well as genre-specific longlists. In the top ten are The Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib, Second Place by Rachel Cusk, and Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford.
An exhibition in London celebrating the work of John Giorno features a new iteration of the poet’s famous Dial-A-Poem project. In an interview with As It Happens, Elizabeth Dee of the John Giorno Foundation reflects on the origins and different iterations of the project: “I think we forget, in the comfort of the technology that’s available to us now, how difficult it was to do things. Particularly things that were outside the box and things that were innovative and new.”
“The first novel is more about the experience of violence, while the second novel is about the spectatorship of violence, what it means to watch such violence unfold at a distance, where there is no agency or possibility of intervention.” Anuk Arudpragasam reflects on the relationship between his first and second novels, The Story of a Brief Marriage and A Passage North. (Los Angeles Review of Books)
An excerpt from R. Kikuo Johnson’s latest graphic novel, No One Else, and a short interview with the author are available online at the New Yorker. “I made the theme of mourning the loss of something you were never fond of central to the story,” says Johnson.
David Rapp of Kirkus reviews the newly released film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune. He praises the film as “not only a visually stunning space opera but also an impressively faithful interpretation of the text.”
Adrienne Vaughan is moving up the ranks at Bloomsbury Publishing USA. Previously executive director and chief operations officer, she is now president. (Shelf Awareness)
Tomás Q. Morín curates a reading list that reflects “survival in all its many forms.” The seven titles include Lima::Limón by Natalie Scenters-Zapico and How to Make a Slave and Other Essays by Jerald Walker. (Electric Literature)
The New York Times Book Review has shared a selection of its past covers, demonstrating the evolution of its appearance from 1896 to 2021.
