Copper Canyon to Publish Lost Neruda Poems, In Defense of Unlinked Story Collections, and More

by
Staff
7.27.15

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:

Nonprofit publisher Copper Canyon Press has acquired the rights to a manuscript of lost poems by Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda. Archivists from the Pablo Neruda Foundation discovered the poems last summer, which have yet to be published in English. Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda is slated for release in April 2016. Poet and novelist Forrest Gander will translate the collection. (New York Times)

In the new issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, award-winning author Percival Everett, whose new short story collection, Half an Inch of Water, is forthcoming in September from Graywolf Press, discusses cultural appropriation, the importance of physical place in his writing, how parody factors into his work, and more.

Author Roxane Gay writes for the New York Times about the death of Sandra Bland, the twenty-eight-year-old African American woman who was found dead in jail after three days. “I don’t want to believe our spirits can be broken. Nonetheless, increasingly, as a black woman in America, I do not feel alive. I feel like I am not yet dead.”

James Schlett’s new book, A Not Too Greatly Changed Eden, details the story of “Philosophers’ Camp,” an 1858 camping expedition in New York’s Adirondack Mountains for American intellectuals, which included poet James Russell Lowell and poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Recently, along with author Bill McKibben, NPR’s Brian Mann set out on the same journey to retrace Emerson’s steps through the mountains.

“I do not need a collection to feel ‘cohesive,’ nor do I spend too much time considering the order. Rather, what I adore is precisely the opposite: a rattling journey from plot to plot, from character to character, from idea to idea.” A literary critic lauds two new noteworthy collections that consist of unlinked short stories: Lauren Holmes’s Barbara the Slut and Other People and Katherine Heiny’s Single, Carefree, Mellow. (Literary Hub)

Author David Shields and Renaissance Hollywood man James Franco have cowritten a book about pop singer Lana Del Rey. Flip-Side: Real and Imaginary Conversations with Lana Del Rey, which is already available for pre-order, will be published next March by powerHouse Books. This isn’t the first time Franco and Shields have collaborated: Earlier this year, Franco directed a film version of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which was written by Shields and Caleb Powell. (Flavorwire)

It’s not “the worst day ever.” Here’s the story of how a New York teen’s inspirational poem found its way to a London bar, and subsequently became a viral sensation. (ABC News)