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:
One might not think of best-selling crime author Agatha Christie as a feminist icon, but the organizers of the International Agatha Christie Festival—which will be held from September 11 to September 20 in Torquay, England—are determined to change that. “Forget the image of the fusty pensioner,” writes Claire Cohen at the Telegraph.“ [Christie] might have been born into middle-class comfort, but she became a working, single mother who faced sexual betrayal and so many of the heartbreaks and hardships familiar to us today.” This year’s festival will celebrate the author’s 125th birthday.
Acclaimed author James Salter passed away Friday at age ninety. Known as a “writer's writer,” Salter’s literary career covered almost six decades. Salter received critical acclaim for his novels and short stories including The Hunters (1956), Light Years (1975), and All That Is (2013). At the New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten writes of Salter’s death and work: “The news, in its way unexpected, felt like one of those breath-stealing turns out of Light Years, his masterpiece, or All That Is, his final work. Both novels span decades, depicting fairly ordinary lives studded with such swipes of fate. Salter, though admired principally as a sculptor of sentences, may have been close to peerless…in his talent, and taste, for expressing the mercilessness of time’s passing.”
Charleston county officials have announced that the St. Andrews Regional Library will be renamed in honor of Cynthia Hurd, who had served as a manager at the library since 2011. Hurd was killed in the Emanuel AME Church shooting last Wednesday. (Post and Courier)
“It is clear that old age was not a chronological matter for Eliot. It was the condition of his imagination, a name for the attenuation of passion, which he simultaneously dreaded and desired.” At Harvard Magazine, Adam Kirsch considers T. S. Eliot’s early years as a poet, as well as his experiences at Harvard.
The Guardian lists ten of the world’s best independent bookstores recommended by its readers. Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon—the largest used bookstore in the world—takes the number one spot. Other stores in the top ten include Shakespeare and Company in Paris, France; City Lights in San Francisco, California; and El Ateneo in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Understanding the language of devotion: Juan Vidal discusses Flannery O’Connor’s religious writing and the connection between literature and prayer. (NPR)
In a special Father’s Day interview at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Paul Cullum speaks with novelist and memoirist Jerry Stahl about his new memoir, OG Dad: Weird Shit Happens When You Don’t Die Young.
