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:
From 1919 to 1920, surrealist artist Salvador Dalí kept a notebook of what he called his “impressions and private memoirs.” Unfortunately, the majority of Dalí’s diary has yet to be translated into English. Perhaps it is time? (Hazlitt)
Publisher George Braziller, who founded his eponymous press in 1955, recently released his first book at the age of ninety-nine. His memoir, Encounters: A Life in Publishing, is written in vignettes that recall his family life and the relationships with the writers he published, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Marc Chagall. The stories, Laura Marsh writes at the New Republic, “are a testament to his skill at recognizing great writers.”
What does the “science of literature” mean today? At the Boston Review, social scientist Ben Merriman examines the current challenges and different scholarly approaches in field of digital humanities.
At Publishers Weekly, poet and novelist Naja Marie Aidt recommends ten of her favorite novels written by poets, which include Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans.
Like many of us, poet Mark Levine first encountered T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” as a teenager. Levine recalls the moment in 1982: “I begin to read: ‘Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table’— and, with a 17-year-old’s sense of imminent upheaval, feel the stirrings of a new language in me, connected to my own language but having passed through fire.” (New York Times)
“Nonsense is not ‘not sense’—it operates at the edge of sense. It teems with sense—at the same time, it resists any kind of universal understanding.” In an interview for the Atlantic’s By Heart series, author Jesse Ball, whose fifth novel, A Cure for Suicide, is out now from Pantheon, considers how one can find meaning in the seemingly nonsensical, using Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabborwocky” as an example.
The New Yorker bids a fond farewell to Brazenhead Books, a secret, speakeasy bookshop run out of a New York City apartment for the past seven years. The store closed down last month.
