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:
“There’s pleasure in ambition, too.” In the New Yorker, Rebecca Mead considers the idea of reading as guilty pleasure, and the pleasure of reading to impress yourself.
According to estimates released yesterday by the U.S. Census Bureau, bookstore sales for the first six months of 2014 were down 7.9 percent compared to the same period last year. (Publishers Weekly)
The Los Angeles Times remembers actress Lauren Bacall—who died on Tuesday at the age of eighty-nine—through her writing. Bacall was the author of three memoirs: By Myself (1978), Now (1994), and By Myself and Then Some (2005).
The Christian Science Monitor takes a look at the late Robin Williams’s role in the 1989 movie Dead Poets Society—a film that celebrates the power of poetry as a tool for self-expression and personal discovery. John Keating, the character that Williams portrayed, was based on real-life teacher and author Samuel F. Pickering.
On the BBC’s Newsnight, author Lee Child—frequent writing partner of Douglas Preston, frontman of the anti-Amazon group Authors United—takes the retailer to task, saying, “Amazon wants to take over the world.”
Meanwhile, Bill Hamilton, the executor of George Orwell’s literary estate, writes to the New York Times with some harsh words for Amazon’s quoting of Orwell in their recent letter to Kindle users. Hamilton writes that Amazon’s tactics come “straight out of Orwell’s own nightmare dystopia, 1984,” adding, “this is about as close as one can get to the Ministry of Truth and its doublespeak: turning the facts inside out to get a piece of propaganda across.” (Flavorwire)
Poet Koh Jee Leong and writer Paul Rozario-Falcone will launch the Singapore Literature Festival in New York City this October. Fifteen Singaporean authors have so far been confirmed for the festival, including Alvin Pang, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, and Wena Poon. (GalleyCat)
In the latest installment of the New York Times’s Bookends series, James Parker and Dana Stevens discuss which books should be made into movies.
