Adichie Sparks Twitter Feminism Debate, Revisiting Susan Sontag, and More

by
Staff
7.1.15

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:

Editor Steve Wasserman revisits the work and legacy of late essayist Susan Sontag at the Los Angeles Review of Books: “She was…one of America’s most influential intellectuals, internationally renowned for the passionate engagement and breadth of her critical intelligence and her ceaseless efforts to promote the cause of human rights. She was, as a writer and as a citizen of the world, a critic and a crusader.”

Inspired by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2014 book We Should All Be Feminists, a Nigerian book club started a nationwide Twitter debate about women’s rights. Using the hashtag  #BeingFemaleInNigeria, women paid tribute to Adichie, and discussed the role of religion and the need for feminism in a country where nearly one third of women experience domestic violence. (Guardian)

The poetry review and newsletter Poetry Flash, which has been publishing continuously since 1972, is facing potential closure due to a rent increase at its Berkeley, California, offices. Members of the Berkeley literary community are proposing various ways to rescue the publication. In addition to publishing a newsletter that includes poetry, book reviews, and a literary calendar, Poetry Flash organizes a weekly reading series and sponsors both the Watershed Poetry Ecology Festival and the Northern California Book Awards. (Daily Californian)

In an effort to limit children’s access to “adult-themed” material, Germany has proposed a law that would regulate the purchase of sexually explicit e-books to the hours between 10PM and 6AM. (National Post)

To correspond with the current issue’s focus on translation, the Paris Review is posting two archived video interviews with translators online this week. The first interview is with poet Czesław Miłosz, which took place at the 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center in 1993. Miłosz translated works by Baudelaire, T. S. Eliot, Whitman, and others, into Polish.

In the July installment of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, award-winning novelist Yiyun Li reads and discusses Patricia Highsmith’s story “The Trouble with Mrs. Blynn, the Trouble with the World.”

Farrar, Straus and Giroux publisher Jonathan Galassi talks to Salon about the shifting world of publishing and how his debut novel, Muse, is a love letter to his youth.