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:
“That’s something I strive for in my poems. On the surface, they’re very accessible and evocative. They have a lot of face value. But within the lines, there’s tremendous emotional complexity. That takes a lot of work.” At the Boston Globe, Colm Tóibín, whose book-length essay On Elizabeth Bishop is out now from Princeton, speaks with James Sullivan about the subtle complexity of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry and life, and how her poems, Tóibín says, show “how to write about loss by implication.”
How would your community benefit from a Little Free Library? Publisher Chronicle Books is celebrating National Library Week by giving away two custom-made and fully stocked Little Free Library structures.
Actress Lena Headey has bought the film rights for Helen Macdonald’s award-winning memoir H is for Hawk. Heady plays Cersei in Game of Thrones, the television adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire book series. (Bookseller)
Meanwhile, self-published author Peter Gallagher filed a $10 million copyright lawsuit against Lionsgate Films and screenwriter Joss Whedon. Gallagher claims that the 2012 film The Cabin in the Woods, for which Whedon co-wrote the screenplay, is “virtually identical” to his 2006 book The Little White Trip: A Night in the Pines. (Wrap)
In addition to his donations to independent bookstores and school libraries in the United States, bestselling author James Patterson is increasing his donations to independent bookshops in the United Kingdom and Ireland to £250,000 (about $369,465). Patterson has allocated £130,000 to seventy-three bookstores since last September. (Shelf Awareness)
A new e-book company called Openbooks allows customers to download and read e-books first, then pay what they want after. Readers are not required to pay at all, however, if they don’t like the book.
In his keynote speech at the London Book Fair yesterday, bestselling British author David Nicholls lamented the closing of fifty-seven independent bookstores in the United Kingdom last year, and said that browsing in bookstores then proceeding to buy books online is “really just a genteel form of shoplifting.” (Guardian)
