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:
Go Set a Watchman, the sequel to Harper Lee’s Pultizer Prize–winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird, will be published in July. Lee completed Watchman in the mid-1950s, and the novel was rediscovered last fall. (Associated Press)
A fire at the Institute for Research Information on Social Services in Moscow, one of Russia’s largest public libraries, has destroyed over one million historical documents—nearly 15 percent of all of the documents in the library. The research center, founded in 1918, houses millions of rare texts, some dating back to the sixteenth century. (CNN)
Electric Literature cofounder Andy Hunter and Black Balloon Publishing cofounder Elizabeth Koch will launch Catapult, a fiction and narrative nonfiction publishing startup, this fall. Catapult’s first title, Padgett Powell’s Cries For Help, Various, is set for release in September. “We hope to contribute to contemporary literary culture and to the pleasure and knowledge of a diverse and serious readership,” said Pat Strachan, most recently a senior editor at Little, Brown, who will serve as Catapult’s editor in chief.
James Franco is set to direct an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s 1936 novel In Dubious Battle. A known fan of Steinbeck, Franco starred in Of Mice and Men on Broadway last year, and also directed a film adaptation of As I Lay Dying in 2013. (Los Angeles Times)
The Huntington Library in California has acquired fifty-two unpublished letters from six generations of Jane Austen’s mother’s family, the Leighs of Adlestrop. These personal letters will “help people develop a more vivid understanding of Austen’s immediate world,” said Vanessa Wilkie, Huntington’s curator of English historical manuscripts. (Guardian)
In need of classic reading suggestions? Take a look at W. H. Auden’s syllabus for his 1942 University of Michigan course, “Fate and the Individual in European Literature,” which required over 6,000 pages of reading. (Poetry Foundation)
Authors James Parker and Anna Holmes debate whether book reviewing is a public service or an art at this week’s New York Times Bookends blog.
