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 New York Times profiles Yu Xiuhua, one of China’s most famous poets. Yu, who has cerebral palsy and has written most of her poetry in a farmhouse in Hubei province, became an Internet sensation in 2014 and is now considered the Emily Dickinson of China.
“Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.” In honor of the solar eclipse that will be visible today from North America, the Atlantic has published Annie Dillard’s classic essay “Total Eclipse,” about viewing a total solar eclipse in 1979.
“What would happen if we allowed our hardened sense of what is real to melt a little? What would happen if we allowed ourselves to be uncertain—about the other, about ourselves?” Nicole Krauss talks with the Guardian about creating malleable characters, writing about Israel, and her new novel, Forest Dark.
British science fiction writer Brian Aldiss died on Saturday at age ninety-two. (Bookseller)
At the New Yorker, James Wood considers Norwegian fiction writer and poet Gunnhild Øyehaug and her “playful, often surreal, intellectually rigorous, and brief” work.
Hell tea, cheap Chinese buffets, and Persian stew—poet Kaveh Akbar shares his food and writing quirks. (Entropy)
Writer Anne Gisleson offers book suggestions from her book club, Existential Crisis Reading Group, including Louise Glück’s poetry, Camus’s Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, and Michael Eric Dyson’s Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America. (Literary Hub)
Katherine Rosman considers the growing number of books that imagine alternative histories of public figures, including a book by Diane Clehane that imagines Princess Diana survived the 1997 car crash and a forthcoming title by Curtis Sittenfeld where Hillary Rodham never marries Bill Clinton. (New York Times)
