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:
What can an accomplished writer learn from the world’s best-selling author? Joyce Maynard describes her experience taking James Patterson’s new online Master Class series. (New York Observer)
At Literary Hub, poet and National Book Award finalist Fred Moten talks with Adam Fitzgerald about collaboration, teaching literature, jazz, and Harold Bloom.
A writer named Catherine Nichols recently conducted a submission experiment that revealed some striking results regarding gender bias in publishing. Nichols sent out fifty manuscript queries as herself, and fifty of the same queries under a male pseudonym. Out of the fifty queries sent, Catherine received two manuscript requests. The male pseudonym, George, received seventeen. “[George] is eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book.” (Jezebel)
“I felt, and feared, that the book was controlling me, somehow, as if I’d somehow become possessed by it.” Author Hanya Yanagihara, whose novel A Little Life is longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, is interviewed at the Millions.
At the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, author Shirley Jackson considers the types of letters she has received from “fans” over the years. Jackson’s new work, Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings, was released yesterday by Random House.
“I am British—mixed-race English and Chinese, but linguistically and culturally British. Did this lessen the legitimacy of my fiction about China?” Author Susan Barker examines the question of authenticity when writing characters outside of one’s own ethnicity. (Los Angeles Review of Books)
Sam Tanenhaus explores Jonathan Franzen’s body of work and his critique of contemporary culture, and suggests that Franzen may be “the best American novelist…because, like the great novelists of the past, he convinces us that his vision unmasks the world in which we actually live.” (New Republic)
