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:
El Salvador’s Supreme Court has reopened the murder case of poet Roque Dalton, who was killed in 1975 by fellow members of the Revolutionary People’s Army, who accused him of working with the CIA. (teleSUR)
Atlas Obscura shares the best notes its readers found in used books, including one note that reads, “What did she ever do to you?” under the author’s dedication in a statistics textbook.
Read more about the charms of used books in the latest installment of the Written Image, which features Kerry Mansfield’s “Expired” project.
Bill Morris spends a day in the Brooklyn offices of indie publisher Akashic Books. (Millions)
“A novel is a long, slow, delicious creation that lives with you the entire time you work on it; a story is a blazing bright flare.” Lauren Groff talks fiction with the Harvard Gazette.
Listen to Groff read an excerpt from her collection in the latest episode of Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast.
The U.S. House of Representatives had rejected an amendment to the federal budget that would have cut $23 million each from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. (Americans for the Arts)
In the United States, bookstore sales in May rose a modest 0.5 percent from last year. Meanwhile, book sales income is up 5 percent from the previous year in the United Kingdom, though recent reports show authors’ earnings have dropped 42 percent in the last decade. (Publishers Weekly, Guardian)
Poet Heid E. Erdrich talks with Literary Hub about writing poems, interrogating the language used in art criticism and science, and editing the recently released anthology New Poets of Native Nations.
“If you believe Appalachia is monolithically conservative and white, if you assume our story is one of privation, redneckery and pipe smokin’ grannies sipping moonshine, you do so because white men have told you that story.” Leah Hampton makes a case for reading more diverse work about Appalachia, such as Elizabeth Catte’s book, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, and Leesa Cross-Smith’s novel, Whiskey & Ribbons. (Los Angeles Times)
