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:
“Social media takes a reader’s moment of interest in you and turns it into a relationship with your sensibility…. The best way to use it as a writer is as a way to record your obsessions or fascinations, or even your disgust, all of it….” Alexander Chee weighs in alongside Roxane Gay, Celeste Ng, and Adam M. Grant on how to be on social media as a writer. (Literary Hub)
The Guardian asks more than twenty writers, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Garth Greenwell, to share their picks for the best summer reads.
“This anthology reminds me that poetry and all art that gives voice to women, immigrants, and people of color has a crucial place in the fight against demagoguery—and that history will remember the way that we treat the most vulnerable among us.” At Vogue, Tariro Mzezewa shares how the work of African women poets collected in New-Generation African Poets, edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, has offered comfort and understanding since Trump issued the travel ban.
“To claim to cherish artistic and intellectual achievement while condemning artists and writers to poverty is to empower fraud, and to deprecate those values—beauty and justice, empathy and altruism—that we derive from literature.” Benjamin Moser and Siddhartha Deb discuss the struggle for writers to make a living and the downsides of relying on institutional support. (New York Times)
On Friday alt-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, who self-published his book Dangerous on July 4, held a protest outside Simon & Schuster’s New York City offices, and announced that he has sued the publisher for $10 million for breach of contract. Simon & Schuster canceled their book deal with Yiannopoulos in February, following the release of a video in which Yiannopoulous appeared to condone pedophilia. (Publishers Weekly)
“He told us to write every day, but only a little bit; to “be more in the world”; to look up when we walk down the street; to avoid distraction; to never talk about real estate.” At the New Yorker, Porter Fox remembers poet Larry Fagin, who died in May.
Emily Watson and Angela Lansbury will star in a new production of Louisa May Alcott’s classic, Little Women. The series, which will be coproduced by BBC and PBS, will begin filming this month. (Los Angeles Times)
Geeta Kothari talks with the Rumpus about writing and living in America as an immigrant, writing essays versus stories or novels, and her debut story collection, I Brake for Moose.
