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 final version of the House-Senate tax deal scraps the provision to treat graduate student tuition waivers as taxable income. Earlier this month, graduate students across the country protested the bill. (Bloomberg)
Vivian Gornick, Meghan O’Rourke, Parul Sehgal, and Heidi Julavits, among others, weigh in on women and power in the workplace and the conversation about sexual harassment. (New York Times Magazine)
“I don’t compare myself to anybody. Know what you like. Stick to it.” Editor and agent Marie Dutton Brown discusses her longtime career in the publishing industry. (Shondaland)
“He saw Harry and immediately began to eat Hermione’s family.” Based on an analysis of all seven Harry Potter books, a predictive text keyboard has written a Harry Potter story entitled “Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash.” (Guardian)
Jennifer Senior considers the acknowledgments sections of book, where “the wretchedness of book-writing finally comes tumbling out” in a “combination of neuroticism and relief, pride and latent terror.” (New York Times)
As 2017 comes to a close, Bustle recommends thirty-five books to look out for in 2018.
“Well into the twenty-first century, he warned that the United States was again coming to resemble its nineteenth-century self in terms of violence, poverty, inequity and plutocratic rule.” Stephan Phelan imagines how E. L. Doctorow would react to the Trump presidency; Doctorow died in 2015. (Boston Review)
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, writers Kiese Laymon and Aisha Sabatini Sloan talk about identity versus influence and pushing against heteronormativity in their work.
