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:
At the Millions, six authors look back on their debut novels and how their relationships with them have changed over time.
The MacArthur Foundation has announced the 2015 recipients of the MacArthur Genius grants. Among the twenty-four fellows are poet, novelist, and critic Ben Lerner, journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates, and poet Ellen Bryant Voigt. Individual awards of $625,000 are given annually to “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.” Read more on the Grants & Awards blog.
Best-selling author Daniel Handler, also known as Lemony Snicket, and his wife, children’s book author Lisa Brown, are donating $1 million to Planned Parenthood. The literary pair’s generous donation comes at a time when federal aid to Planned Parenthood is at risk of being significantly cut. (Shelf Awareness)
Fifty years after the publication of Sylvia Plath’s poetry collection Ariel, a quintessential mid-century “confessional” work, writers Leslie Jamison and Charles McGrath discuss the legacy of “confessional” writing in the age of memoir: “American literary culture features both a glut of so-called “confessional” work and an increasingly familiar knee-jerk backlash against it: This writing is called solipsistic or narcissistic…. Its heritage is often traced to women writers, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and its critiques are insidiously—and subcutaneously—gendered.” (New York Times)
At the Rumpus, Pulitzer Prize–winning fiction writer Adam Johnson discusses the difference between therapeutic writing and storytelling, the power of scene-based realism, and his new story collection, Fortune Smiles, which is currently longlisted for the National Book Award.
“He believes that the propositions his writing presents—uncreative writing’s permission to borrow entire texts, for example—are more interesting than the writing itself.” The New Yorker’s Alec Wilkinson considers conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s “challenging behavior,” which many in the poetry world feel has gone too far—particularly after Goldsmith’s “performance” last spring of Michael Brown’s autopsy report.
Do you feel like your days would be better if you could read more Jane Austen quotes? There’s an app for that. The Jane Austen Center in Bath, England, has launched the Jane Austen Daily Quote App, which directly delivers Austen witticisms to users’ smartphones. (Guardian)
