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:
Yesterday, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin opened its Gabriel García Márquez archive to researchers. The archive contains more than seventy-five boxes of the Nobel Prize–winning novelist’s manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, and ephemera. (Austin360)
Random House vice president and executive editor David Ebershoff is leaving the publisher to focus on his writing career. Ebershoff, who has been with Random House for the past twenty years, is the author of the novels The Danish Girl and The 19th Wife.
A Cambridge University academic claims to have traced the first print use of the ellipsis back to…the sixteenth century. Dr. Anne Toner believes the first instance of the three dots appeared in a 1588 English translation of Roman dramatist Terence’s Andria. (Guardian)
In a 1915 letter to his publisher, Franz Kafka prohibited all drawings of the insect figure that his protagonist Gregor Samsa turned into in his novella The Metamorphosis. Against Kafka’s wishes, novelist Vladimir Nabokov drew the figure anyway. The Metamorphosis was published one hundred years ago this month. (Open Culture, Biography)
Novelist and essayist Paul West has died Sunday at age eighty-five. West was known for his ornate prose style and wrote twenty-four novels, including Tenement of Clay (1965), The Rat Man of Paris (1986), and Love’s Mansion (1992). West is survived by his wife, the poet and nature writer Diane Ackerman.
Beginning next month, writer Anna March will host a new event series titled Beyond Lolita: Literary Writers on Sex and Sexuality. The events will take place at five independent bookstores in different cities around the country. Proceeds from the events will support PEN American Center’s Writers’ Emergency Fund, which awards individual grants of up to $2,000 to writers in “acute, emergency financial crisis.” Cheryl Strayed, Audrey Niffenegger, and other acclaimed authors will participate in the series. (Shelf Awareness)
