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:
The Game Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California has created a video game based on Henry David Thoreau’s transcendentalist classic, Walden. In “Walden, a game,” players are encouraged to reflect on natural beauty while engaging in the same activities Thoreau did in 1845 when he retreated to Walden Pond, such as writing, fishing, and collecting arrowheads. (New York Times)
The New Yorker profiles the famously reticent Elizabeth Bishop in light of a new biography published earlier this month by Megan Marshall, Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast. The book reveals details of the poet’s personal life, including childhood abuse and love affairs, which she sought to keep private.
Publishers Weekly ranks America’s twenty largest publishers according to units sold in 2016, starting with Penguin Random House. After the “Big Five” houses, Scholastic and Disney sold the most books.
A novel published in 1943 by Sabahattin Ali, Madonna in a Fur Coat, is experiencing a renaissance in Turkey, with nearly a million copies sold in the last three years. Ali, a dissident intellectual and Communist, was persecuted by the Turkish government and eventually murdered in 1948 as he tried to flee Europe. (New York Times)
From Herman Melville’s traveling lap desk lined with brown velvet to Charlotte Brontë’s sloping mahogany desk, the Awl takes a look at the desks of famous authors and how much money these items fetched at auction.
“I’ve always loved science, whether it’s paleontology or anatomy. There’s something about those fields’ immediate and incandescent impulse to uncover, unearth, bring to light.” R. A. Villanueva talks about how science plays into his poetry. (Divedapper)
Max Wallis has been appointed the first poet in residence of the gay dating app Grindr. (Guardian)
“Two hundred pages in, I shook off the last remnants of androgyny and openly affirmed my womanhood for the first time.” Nell Zink relates her experience reading Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook. (n+1)
