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.
The Swedish Academy’s selection of Peter Handke for the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature continues to provoke controversy. Handke faces criticism for his support of Slobodan Milošević, the Serbian leader tried in The Hague for war crimes. This past week, Handke received his award and delivered his Nobel lecture in Stockholm. The New York Times surveys these most recent developments, and collects comments from both Handke’s defenders and critics.
Employees at McNally Jackson, an independent bookstore with multiple locations across New York City, will vote this Thursday on whether or not to join the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union. According to Publishers Weekly, a majority of the company’s employees are expected to vote “yes.”
Neil Gaiman recently asked his Twitter followers, “What reminds you of warmth?” With nearly a thousand replies for inspiration, he wrote the poem “What You Need to be Warm” to help launch the Winter Emergency Appeal from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. (Guardian)
“I didn’t just want it to be a collection of poems. I wanted it to be one single statement.” Malcolm Tariq talks to the Rumpus about the origins of his debut collection, Heed the Hollow.
Last month Tariq answered Ten Questions from Poets & Writers Magazine.
Electric Literature has announced its fifteen favorite story collections of 2019. The list includes Black Light by Kimberly King Parsons, Home Remedies by Xuan Juliana Wang, and Lot by Bryan Washington, among others.
Parsons recently contributed five micro-essays to the Poets & Writers Magazine Craft Capsules series.
At the Millions, Merve Emre reflects on a year of reading, and how she often remembers books by “who I have read them with or where.”
The Chicago Review of Books has selected its eleven favorite books in translation from 2019.
And in more translation news, World Literature Today has assembled a list of seventy-five notable translations published in 2019.
