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:
“From the letters Ted sent me at that time, it is clear just how intoxicated Ted was with Sylvia and she with him. ‘Marriage is my medium,’ he wrote. ‘You have no idea what a happy life Sylvia and I lead.’” An excerpt from the memoir of Gerald Hughes—brother of the poet Ted Hughes—reveals happier times in the troubled relationship between Ted Hughes and poet Sylvia Plath. (Salon)
Publisher Penguin Random House has surpassed its initial goal of donating twenty-five thousand books to Save the Children from its #GiveaBook social media program. The program began on November 29, and the publisher has pledged to donate another ten thousand books through December 24. (Shelf Awareness)
Writers on Writing: Novelists Elizabeth Gilbert, Chimamanda Adichie, and Tracy Chevalier talk about their writing processes and sources of creativity on NPR.
Meta-poetic? The Poetry Foundation has compiled a list of the best year-end poetry lists from various media outlets.
Over at the New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz examines the reasons behind independent publisher Melville House’s costly decision to publish the Senate Intelligence Committee Torture Report over the holidays.
Readers appear to be experiencing a form of “celebrity memoir exhaustion.” According to Nielsen BookScan, this year’s sales of celebrity autobiographies are down 4 percent compared to 2013. (Guardian)
Based on the frequency of Internet searches, Merriam-Webster’s word of the year is “culture,” and the runners-up are “nostalgia,” “insidious,” “feminism,” and “je ne sais quoi.” Linguistics professor Alexis Cornelia Wellwood and poet Elisa Gabbert discuss what these words reveal about…well, our culture. (International Business Times)
