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:
Bibliophiles and “shelfie” sharers take note: A new app called Shelfie allows users to take photos of their bookshelves and receive free or discounted digital or audio versions of the titles in the “shelfies.” (Time)
It was apparently Herman Melville’s brother, Allan, who decided on the title Moby-Dick; a last-minute change from The Whale. What remains unclear is whether or not the mysterious hyphen was intentional. (Smithsonian)
The publisher of a collection of three early stories by J. D. Salinger has dropped its copyright lawsuit against the J. D. Salinger Literary Trust. The suit, which was originally filed in March by the Devault-Graves Agency, accused the Salinger Literary Trust of thwarting the press’s attempts to publish international editions of its Salinger title, Three Early Stories. (Publishers Weekly)
National Book Award–winning poet Terrance Hayes shares his reading preferences and writing advice with the Boston Globe.
Over at the New Yorker, writer Adrienne Raphel considers the shifting rules of language and punctuation in the age of the Internet, and looks at how they are explained in a new book by linguist and editor David Crystal called Making a Point: The Persnickety Story of English Punctuation.
At Bomb, Indonesian novelist Eka Kurniawan discusses his process, writing under Indonesia’s turbulent political environment, and his novels Beauty Is a Wound and Man Tiger, the latter which came out in English this year.
On the sixtieth anniversary of its first publication, ten writers revisit Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, and reflect on how their experience with the text has changed over time. (New Republic)
