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:
Indie press Two Dollar Radio is opening a bookstore in Columbus, Ohio, that will carry a selection of its own titles, as well as books published by fellow indie publishers. Two Dollar Radio Headquarters will open in September and will also house a bar and vegan café. (Publishers Weekly)
Actress Sarah Jessica Parker has acquired the first book for her imprint with Hogarth, SJP. Parker, who started SJP last fall and will focus her list on literary fiction, will publish Fatima Farheen Mirza’s debut novel, A Place for Us. Parker also recently announced Stephanie Powell Watts’s novel No One Is Coming to Save Us as her first pick for Book Club Central, the American Library Association’s new online platform for book recommendations. (New York Times, ABC News)
Meanwhile, Penguin Random House has announced it will close Blue Rider Press, the imprint started in 2011 by David Rosenthal that has published the books of celebrities and public figures such as Jeff Bridges, James Carville, and Carrie Fisher. Blue Rider Press books will now be published under the Dutton imprint. (Publishers Weekly)
The American Literary Translators Association has announced the longlists for the 2017 National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose.
In the latest online update of the Oxford English Dictionary, editors have added hundreds of words including “widdly” (showy and over-elaborate, used especially to describe the playing of an electric guitar), “hygge” (a Danish word describing a quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being), and several words related to tennis. (Guardian)
The Los Angeles Review of Books and the University of Southern California have launched a five-week workshop on digital and print publishing, which kicked off its first session this week. The workshop aims to help students be innovative in the “hidebound risk-adverse industry” of publishing.
“This is a memoir, not a polemic, and I’m not a spokesperson for the fat community by any stretch, nor would they want me to be. But I would love to see more acknowledgement of how challenging it is to feel positive about fatness when you can’t find clothing. When there literally is not something made for your body.” Roxane Gay talks with Guernica about her new memoir about the body, Hunger.
