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:
“Bob Silvers was the loveliest person there was to work for…. He made one feel set free as a writer, and he wanted a piece to be an adventure.” Lorrie Moore, along with six other writers including Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates, remember Robert B. Silvers, the founding editor of the New York Review of Books, who died on Monday. (New Yorker)
The University of Chicago Library has opened the archives of writer and Nobel laureate Saul Bellow. The archives include Bellow’s drafts of The Adventures of Augie March, his Rolodex, and letters he received from writers such as Ralph Ellison and Phillip Roth. (UChicago News)
Meanwhile, yesterday Amazon opened a bricks-and-mortar bookstore in Chicago that only stocks books that received a rating of more than four and a half stars online. (Chicago Tribune, Business Insider)
Someone is leaving empty A1 steak sauce bottles all over a public library in Avon Lake, Ohio. Since January, the library staff has been searching for the culprit behind the “steak-sauce madness.” (Los Angeles Times)
The New Republic takes a look at the appeal of David Foster Wallace to conservatives in the wake of Supreme Court–nominee Neil Gorsuch referencing the writer’s famous commencement speech, “This Is Water,” during his confirmation hearings yesterday.
Airea D. Matthews, whose debut poetry collection, Simulcra, won the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and will come out later this month, talks with Literary Hub about the influence of philosophy in her work, texting with an imaginary Anne Sexton, and incorporating play into her poetry.
In a series of e-mails they wrote to one another, Anne K. Yoder and debut novelist Patty Yumi Cottrell discuss architecture, artistic influence, and how to “navigate the madness of the world.” (Millions)
Alex Good makes a case against the rise in aliteracy, or “the growth of a population that can read but simply doesn’t want to,” especially among writers and academics. (Walrus)
