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:
In Boston, a public-art installation titled “Raining Poetry” is bringing poetry to the people in a fun, unique way. The nonprofit Mass Poetry and the city of Boston have stenciled poems on sidewalks in a water-repellant spray that is invisible during dry weather and appears only when it rains. (Smithsonian)
According to World Fantasy Award–winning writer John Crowley, the genre of science fiction began in 1616 with German author Johann Valentin Andrae’s book, The Chemical Wedding. This November, Crowley is working with a German language scholar to publish his own version of the story. (Guardian)
“Extremely long titles that are sentences are still Very Much A Thing.” At Electric Literature, Kelly Luce shares twelve trends in contemporary fiction she observed from reading short story submissions for the 2016 O. Henry Prize.
Barnes & Noble College has partnered with fourteen more U.S. colleges and universities to operate their campus bookstores; the new partnerships will provide an estimated 140,000 students and faculty with books and course materials. (Yahoo! News)
Poet francine j. harris discusses her most recent collection, play dead, as well as embracing how language shifts over time, and how a poet plays with expectations. “A poet is interested in trying to reach the point where you understand, and then pushing that understanding.” (Divedapper)
In an interview at the Paris Review, fiction writer Stephanie Danler talks about the influences behind her debut novel, Sweetbitter, which is released today from Knopf.
A new biography of Herman Melville, as well as a new novel about the author, delve into his love affairs to discover the muse of his novel Moby-Dick. Was it Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he dedicated the novel, or his neighbor Sarah Morewood? (Wall Street Journal)
