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:
An Italian newspaper recently claimed to have discovered the true identity of best-selling and pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante: a Neapolitian University professor of history named Marcella Marmo. Marmo, however, denies the claims: “Thank you to everyone who thought that I could be a happy best-seller writer, but as I’ve already tried in vain to say in recent days, I am not Elena Ferrante.” (Slate)
“It’s weird for a poet to be famous, and no one feels this weirdness more deeply than poets themselves.” At the Poetry Foundation, poet Arielle Greenberg considers the idea of a writer’s “invented self,” particularly as it relates to poet Eileen Myles’s recent ascent to celebrity status.
A new world ranking of international literacy rates has found that the most literate nation in the world is Finland. The United States comes in at seventh. (Washington Post)
The estate of late Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Harper Lee has informed booksellers that it will no longer allow publication of the mass-market edition of To Kill a Mockingbird. (New Republic)
“All of the books are arranged cover out, rather than spine out, in the belief that it makes browsing more friendly.” New York Times reporter Nick Wingfield visits Amazon’s first physical bookstore in Seattle to discuss the retailer’s corporate strategy and what makes the store different from other bookshops. Last week, Amazon announced it would open a second brick-and-mortar store in San Diego in several months.
The Weekly Standard profiles Stanley Fish, an academic of High Theory and seventeenth-century poetry who became a polarizing New York Times op-ed columnist.
Last week the United States Academy of Arts and Letters announced twelve new inductees, among which include novelist Peter Carey and former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins. British author Julian Barnes was also added as an honorary foreign member. (Associated Press)
