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:
Celebrated author Terry Pratchett, best known for his Discworld series of novels, has passed away at age sixty-six. Pratchett had suffered from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. "The world has lost one of its brightest, sharpest minds," said Transworld Publishers' Larry Finlay. (Guardian)
“Over the past few years, the art world has been throwing around the term ‘post-Internet’ to describe the practices of artists who use the Web as the basis for their work but don’t make a big deal about it…We’re beginning to see a similar turn in poetry.” At the New Yorker, Kenneth Goldsmith discusses several new poetry collections in the context of “post-Internet poetry:” Steven Zultanski’s Bribery, Sam Riviere’s Kim Kardashian’s Marriage, and an anthology edited by Harry Burke titled I Love Roses When They’re Past Their Best.
If owning and operating a New England Inn is your dream, enter an essay contest and you could win the Center Lovell Inn in southwest Maine. Current owner Janice Sage, who won the Inn in an essay contest twenty-two years ago, will judge essay submissions on the subject, “Why I would like to own and operate a country Inn.” (ABC News)
At the Boston Review, Stefania Heim introduces a forum on race and the poetic avant-garde, featuring responses by contemporary writers such Dorothy Wang, Lyn Hejinian, Erica Hunt, and Mónica de la Torre.
Ireland’s national broadcaster RTE recently ran a contest called A Poem for Ireland, which intended to find Ireland’s most beloved poem written in the last century. Seamus Heaney’s “When all the others were away at Mass” was announced the winner, yet declaring a winner was not as important as creating a national conversation about Ireland’s poetic past and future, and attempting to “revive the interest of those who abandon poetry once they pass through school gates.” (New York Times)
“I do think in some ways storytelling is an attempt to bring order to the world and to bring order to our experience and to shape it in some kind of meaningful way, and I think memory rises from a similar impulse.” The Millions interviews author Laura van den Berg about her acclaimed debut novel Find Me, which was published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
A new novel from bestselling author Margaret Atwood is set for publication by Bloomsbury in September, the Bookseller reports. The Heart Goes Last is Atwood’s first stand-alone novel since The Blind Assassin, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2000.
Julia M. Stasch has been chosen as the new MacArthur Foundation President. Stasch, who has served as the interim president for the past eight months, said she is “honored to be asked to help bring MacArthur’s significant assets to bear on the complex and challenging problems of our times.”
