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:
To mark the one-year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, University of Oxford academics, along with the help of the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, have translated Voltaire’s 1763 Treatise on Tolerance into English. The English edition is released by Open Book Publishers, and includes the tracts of more than fifty Enlightenment philosophers and writers. Dr. Caroline Warman, who led the translation project, said, “We want this book to reach people thinking about tolerance and intolerance, and to inspire them to connect with our history, as they discover that major European thinkers of the past also wrote passionately about these topics.” (Guardian)
A new edition of Adolf Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf, was published in Germany on Friday for the first time since 1945. The annotated edition is two thousand pages long and is priced at approximately $64. Controversy continues to surround the decision to republish the work, particularly among Jewish groups in Germany. (New York Times)
Over at Literary Hub, fiction writer Charles Baxter recalls his experiences with late poet Larry Levis. “I remember him as a poet with enormous technical resources, as a person who seemed to project a resigned, affable sadness, and a wariness that occasionally let its own guard down.” A collection of Levis’s final poems, The Darkening Trapeze, is out now from Graywolf Press. (Shelf Awareness)
Last night’s Golden Globe awards featured quite a few wins for films that were adapted from books, including The Revenant, The Martian, Mozart in the Jungle, and Room.
In related news, Publishers Weekly lists its most anticipated book adaptations for 2016.
The Virginia Quarterly Review is starting a yearlong literary storytelling experiment on Instagram called #VQRTrueStory. Over the course of the year, the ninety-one-year-old magazine will publish one photograph along with an accompanying nonfiction essay each day. (NiemanLab)
The Swedish Academy, the members of which select the recipients of the Nobel Prize, has opened its archives and revealed the names of the 1965 nominees in literature who did not end up winning the Nobel. The nominees include Vladimir Nabokov, W. H. Auden, Pablo Neruda, and Jorge Luis Borges, who lost out to the “controversial” choice of Mikhail Sholokhov. (Guardian)
