Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories.
“This time, at first, I really tried to get out of myself. Then I realized, Okay, all the characters are still writing like me, thinking like me, so I tried to use them as vessels to take me to places I wouldn’t normally go.” In conversation with Torrey Peters, Karl Ove Knausgaard discusses the continuity between his autofiction and his new polyphonic novel, The Morning Star. (Vulture)
Elizabeth A. Harris of the New York Times recaps the fallout of recent racist incidents at various literary organizations, including at the Romance Writers of America, the National Book Critics Circle, and the American Booksellers Association.
“I think often of what will happen to my recipes when I die. To lose someone, I now know, is, most tragically, to lose their ideas.” Writer and editor T Kira Māhealani Madden considers how “flavor and nourishment” bind people together. (Autostraddle)
“It is much more painless for me and the people around me when I am able to walk with a posture of unknowing, of openness to the possibility of having been/being wrong.” Kaveh Akbar, the author of Pilgrim Bell, praises uncertainty in life and in poetry. (Rumpus)
An interview with Akbar appears in the latest print issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“I was writing trauma; I wasn’t writing about trauma—for me, that’s a very important distinction.” Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi discusses entering the cognitive state of trauma in her latest novel, Savage Tongues. (Catapult)
During the research process for his forthcoming book, The Philip Roth We Don’t Know, Jacques Berlinerblau found Philip Roth to be a zealous and sometimes unethical networker. “It was a bit disillusioning for me, as I thought—naively—that the great writer cared only for art, its integrity, its austere demands.” (Guardian)
“I’m okay with being criticized. Some books by minorities are kind of, like, patted on the head, and people say, ‘Good job, you spoke your truth.’ If that happens, I’ll be extremely disappointed.” Jay Caspian Kang hopes his new nonfiction book, The Loneliest Americans, will inspire more productive arguments about the Asian American experience. (Publishers Weekly)
