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.
After nearly fourteen years of publishing, celebrated imprint Spiegel & Grau has been shut down, as Penguin Random House streamlines its operations. The imprint’s founders, editors Cindy Spiegel and Julie Grau, had just overseen one of the imprint’s most successful years, publishing multiple high-profile titles in 2018. (New York Times)
U.K.–based hedge fund Man Group has announced that following this year’s awards, it will withdraw its annual £1.6 million support of the Man Booker Prize, ending an eighteen year partnership. (BBC)
Jay Asher, author of the best-selling young adult novel Thirteen Reasons Why, has filed a lawsuit against the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and the group’s executive director, Lin Oliver. Last year, the society announced Asher had violated its anti-harassment policy after a group of its members accused the writer of sexual misconduct. (New York Times)
“You become the protagonist for a little while, but you have to realize it’s going to move on.” Nearly a decade after winning the Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel, Tinkers, Paul Harding is content to write, rather than be, the lead character. (Vulture)
Publishers Weekly presents ten new writers to watch, in a list of upcoming debut fiction that includes We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Lot by Bryan Washington, and Optic Nerve by María Gainza.
“Stories were used not only for entertainment and digression, but also to save lives, to get out of executions, to fall in love, to get someone to fall in love with you...there was such an elasticity to the storytelling in One Thousand and One Nights that I thought this is something I had to adopt in my own novel.” At NPR, Jamil Jan Kochai talks about the multi-layered, nested stories of his debut novel, 99 Nights in Logar.
“Writing a book sometimes gives you the excuse, the permission to pick up the phone and call people. I’ve always felt that way, whenever I’ve done a journalistic piece—a personal history piece—it’s always been spurred by what I really want to know but I don’t have permission ask.” Dani Shapiro discusses turning over every stone she could find for her new memoir, Inheritance. (Millions)
At the Atlantic, Brandon Tensley reappraises the fictional teen detectives who enchanted him as a seven-year-old. “Rereading the Hardy Boys series has been an opportunity to untangle my nostalgia around the sleuths, who inadvertently helped me understand my identity through a fictional world not exactly built with boys like me in mind.”
And the U.K.’s “Emergency Poet,” Deborah Alma, who has spent the last six years prescribing remedial verse from the back of a nineteen-seventies ambulance, is set to open a poetry pharmacy in Shropshire. (Guardian)
