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:
Kaya Thomas is expanding the mobile app she made in college, We Read Too, which provides a directory of more than six hundred books featuring characters of color written by writers of color. Thomas, who has already raised more than ten thousand dollars through a crowdfunding campaign, plans to add more books to the directory, make a website, and redesign the app. (Huffington Post)
The blog Global English Editing has attempted to determine the twenty most popular books throughout history and compile it into an infographic, starting with the I Ching and the Iliad and ending with the Harry Potter series and Fifty Shades of Grey. (Electric Literature)
At the Guardian Claire Armitstead considers the shifting definition of historical fiction, especially after the success of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, and the artistic liberties writers take in depicting the past.
In the latest installment of the Atlantic’s By Heart series, Colum McCann writes about how Wendell Berry’s poetry has influenced him and offers advice for aspiring writers on how to face the blank page by “abandoning yourself to mystery.”
A new serial reading experience is in the works: Wordisode, a digital project based in Boston, has launched its first season. Subscribers receive a daily e-mail with a short installment of an action-packed story, and writers can submit stories to be featured.
Christian Lorentzen considers two recently released memoirs written by critics—Lee Siegel’s The Draw and Daphne Merkin’s This Close to Happy—and how the pair came to occupy “enviable perches” in the golden age of New York criticism. (Vulture)
Vice profiles Patricia Lockwood, the “Poet Laureate of Twitter.” Lockwood’s new memoir, Priestdaddy, which details her adolescence and her father’s conversion to Catholicism, will be released in May.
Dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov describes meeting Russian poet Joseph Brodsky in the 1970s at a café in New York City’s Greenwich Village, and how Brodsky “looked you directly in the eyes, almost like he was digging for truth in the gaze of the speaker.” (Guardian)
