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:
Conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith has stirred up Internet criticism after performing a controversial reading during a conference at Brown University over the weekend. Goldsmith, who is known for what he calls “uncreative writing,” read the autopsy report of Michael Brown—the unarmed black teen fatally shot in Ferguson, Missouri, last fall—as a poem titled “The Body of Michael Brown.” (Guardian)
Nebraska’s NET Radio multimedia project, “Lost Writers of the Plains,” profiles eight writers of the plains region in a series of radio essays, an e-book, and archived materials from the literary journal Prairie Schooner. Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin suggests that this project successfully exhibits how great writing grows out of the specific and into the universal, and offers a model of how different regions “might approach their literary legacies.”
Tencent Literature, the online publishing subsidiary of Chinese Internet giant Tencent, announced its new partnership with Boston-based publisher Trajectory. The partnership will bring Tencent’s e-book library of over 200,000 Chinese-language titles to the United States, and in turn Trajectory’s English-language titles will be available in China on Tencent’s platform. (Melville House)
Meanwhile, celebratory events for the tenth anniversary of English PEN’s Writers in Translation program kick off tonight in London. Over the past ten years, English PEN has provided grants for more than one hundred writers’ translation projects in nearly fifty different languages. (Bookseller)
“Adopting an unfamiliar perspective helps you observe the world in fresh, revealing ways—helps you see things you might never have glimpsed through your own eyes.” Author Tania James discusses how Peter Carey’s novel The True History of the Kelly Gang taught her the value of writing outside of one’s experience. (Atlantic)
The Devault-Graves Agency, a Memphis-based independent publisher, has sued the J. D. Salinger Literary Trust on claims that the estate has kept the press from internationally publishing and distributing its collection of Salinger’s short stories Three Early Stories. (Publishers Weekly)
Writer Andrew Shaffer’s popular parody Twitter account of bestselling author Jonathan Franzen—@EmperorFranzen—has been suspended. Shaffer said that “Emperor Franzen,” which he’s been running for five years, became more than just a parody of Jonathan Franzen, but of high-minded fiction writers in general. Luckily, a similar parody account has yet to be suspended: @GuyInYourMFA. (Washington Post)
