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:
They were peers, decidedly not friends, and not quite “frenemies.” At the Poetry Foundation, writer Alexandra Pechman considers the complicated relationship between Brazilian fiction writer Clarice Lispector and poet Elizabeth Bishop. “To associate with someone might mean to let her talents suggest your own; to inspire jealousy or insecurity can be flattering. This kind of relationship needs a different kind of vocabulary.”
Best-selling Swedish author Henning Mankell died Sunday at age sixty-seven. Mankell was a leading figure in the Nordic noir genre, best known for his series of crime novels featuring Swedish police inspector Kurt Wallander. Over the course of his career, Henning wrote more than forty books of fiction and forty plays. (New York Times)
In the latest installment of Biographile’s Under the Influence series, in which noted authors share their inspiration, Salman Rushdie discusses the nature of literary influence, its vast capacity and omnipresence, and how to channel the work of others to bring “newness into the world.”
Jonathan Bate’s new biography of late poet Ted Hughes, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorized Life, has garnered controversy over Bate’s rights to Hughes’s archive—which were ultimately revoked—as well as the book’s omission of details regarding Hughes’s part in poet Sylvia Plath’s suicide. In a review at the Independent, Jonathan Gibbs writes, “Bate doesn’t explicitly convict or exculpate Hughes for Plath’s death, but this is broadly a redemptive book.” Meanwhile, Bate discusses the controversy and the genesis of his biographical project.
An exhibit opening this weekend at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art examines the history of Black Mountain College, the famed, experimental arts institution that lasted just twenty-three years, from 1933-1957. Black Mountain’s literature teachers and students included poets Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson. (Boston Globe)
“A long time ago I’d concluded that there was no point in my life if I wasn’t to be a writer.” Part fourteen of British author Jenny Diski’s new memoir—which is being published serially in the London Review of Books—is now online.
In today’s fragmented and tense sociopolitical landscape, E. M. Forster’s famous phrase “only connect” may appear suspect. Author and law professor Jedediah S. Purdy suggests that acclaimed writers Ta-Nehisi Coates and Elena Ferrante succeed in making human connection seem more possible by resisting its expected principles. “These writers render, at arrestingly high resolution, the distance of our minds from one another, and the gaps and barriers between a person and the world. What unifies their writing is refusal to indulge the wish that language—the language of unity, universality, even sympathetic imagination—can rejoin what living sunders.” (Los Angeles Review of Books)
