Poets on Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, James Patterson’s Holiday Gift to Indie Bookstores, and More by Staff Daily News Online Only, posted 12.15.14 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 todays stories: “We are all grateful to Claudia for reminding us that our work as poets can have a great political significance.” In the wake of recent racially charged violent occurrences, poet Carmen Giménez Smith leads a two-part roundtable discussion with contemporary writers Ruth Ellen Kocher, Nick Flynn, and Mark Nowak about Claudia Rankine’s latest collection, Citizen: An American Lyric. (Los Angeles Review of Books) How did the Bard become the Bard? Shakespearean scholar Cameron Hunt McNabb examines the factors contributing to Shakespeare’s literary reputation, which include the discovery of the First Folio, the actor David Garrick, and the early spread of the British Empire. (Salon) Happy Holidays to independent bookstores! Bestselling author James Patterson has donated the final installment of his 2014 million-dollar grant to independent bookstores. The $473,000 gift is part of Patterson’s campaign to raise awareness about the importance of reading. The author will continue to donate funds to independent bookstores in 2015. (Publishers Weekly) Today is International Tea Day, and even if you’re not a tea-drinker, you can sip on a few of the Guardian’s literary tea references, from the Mad Hatter’s tea party to T. S. Eliot’s painfully hesitant J. Alfred Prufrock, who goes through “a hundred indecisions, / And… a hundred visions and revisions / Before the taking of toast and tea.” While the notable lack of diversity in publishing remains an ongoing issue, Publishers Weekly has organized a list of responses from book industry professionals on practical ways to combat this disparity in the industry. The 2015 Folio prize longlist has been announced. The prize sets out “to identify works of fiction in which the story being told and the subjects being explored achieve their most perfect and thrilling expression.” The shortlist will be announced on February 9, 2015, and the winner will be announced on March 23. “To describe his line breaks as arbitrary would be a kindness.” At the New York Times Sunday Book Review, poet Paul Muldoon discusses the “contradictory nature” in the collected letters and poems of absurdist author Samuel Beckett. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is set to publish an English-language version of Nobel Prize–winner Patrick Modiano’s novel So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood late next year. (GalleyCat)
Posted on: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 10:04:16 +0000
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