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.
“The data suggest that there are two options available for writers of color within this system, neither of which is equitable or promising: beat the odds, or comp white.” At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Laura B. McGrath investigates how the system of “comp titles” codifies discrimination in an 86-percent-white publishing industry.
At the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik examines new readings of sacred texts. “Entangling texts one with another is our way of entrapping a credible idea of the holy, a net for catching God.”
“Poets alone won’t save us, but they are helping to keep words honest, multifaceted, and ultimately powerful.” Craig Morgan Teicher recommends upcoming collections that step up to the task, including Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, Still Life With Mother and Knife by Chelsea Rathburn, and The Tradition by Jericho Brown. (NPR)
Poetry books saw a 12 percent rise in U.K. sales last year, according to Nielsen BookScan. Two-thirds of buyers were younger than thirty-four; young and teenage women made up the largest consumer group. (Guardian)
In New York City, the last of Penguin staff members have left their Hudson Street office, joining their Random House colleagues uptown on Broadway. Penguin Random House CEO Madeline McIntosh talks to Publishers Weekly about the move and the merger.
Poets and critics continue to pay tribute to Mary Oliver, who passed away last week. “I learned from Mary Oliver how attention is a kind of love, how shining your mind’s light on a thing—a grasshopper, a bird, a tree—is a way of showing gratitude,” remembers Maggie Smith at the Washington Post. Also at the Post, Sarah Kaplan adds, “She has a scientist’s gift for noticing, for observing nature closely enough to charge everyday instants with meaning.” And at the New Yorker, Stephanie Burt says, “Oliver’s decades of litanies and rediscoveries provided so many readers with what Kenneth Burke called ‘equipment for living,’ tools to fight gloom, to open the front door, to lead wilder or more precious lives.”
At the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks asks whether a work in translation can be a masterpiece in its own right. “It is not that the original has achieved some mystical perfection, but it is marshalling syntax, lexical choices, rhetorical devices, and cultural context—everything, in short—to conjure up that density of possible meaning combined with felicity of expression that gets us so excited when we read good literature.”
“If someone is going to spend their whole life becoming a curling champion, then writing a novel isn’t that bad.” Novelist Anelise Chen on an overlapping question in both sports and art: “What’s the point?” (Guernica)
