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:
Not all of John Keats’s and Walt Whitman’s contemporaries appreciated their artistic visions. In 1855, an anonymous reviewer in the Critic said of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, “Is it possible that the most prudish nation in the world will adopt a poet whose indecencies stink in the nostrils? ... Walt Whitman is, as unacquainted with art, as a hog is with mathematics.” Read more (unintentionally) funny, scathing reviews of classic works at the Guardian.
In advance of the “First Editions/Second Thoughts” auction on December 2 in New York City, Philip Roth, Lydia Davis, George Saunders, and other renowned authors comment on rereading their own works years after their publication. Christie’s will auction off seventy-five first edition books annotated by their authors to benefit PEN American Center. For a complete list of auction works, visit PEN’s website. (T Magazine)
Joshua Ferris has won the 2014 International Dylan Thomas Prize for his novel, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (Viking). Before winning the £30,000 award, Ferris’s novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The Dylan Thomas Prize is open to any writer of fiction, poetry, or drama who is under the age of thirty-nine, which was Thomas’s age when he died. (Bookseller)
“What is it, exactly, about genre that is unliterary—and what is it in ‘the literary’ that resists genre? The debate goes round and round, magnetic and circular—a lovers’ quarrel among literati.” Over at the New Yorker, Joshua Rothman comments on the often-vexing aspects of the “genre debate,” and suggests that a “good genre system…can help us see the traditions in which we’re already, unconsciously, immersed.”
Bookselling is looking bright for the nation’s capital. After the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., announced yesterday that it would be opening satellite locations in Busboys and Poets restaurants, a new independent bookstore, Upshur Street Books, celebrated a successful opening week in Northwest Washington. (Washington Post)
One week has passed since Nation Novel Writing Month began. Don’t let those 50,000 words overwhelm you; head over to Fast Company for NaNoWriMo support and time-management advice.
Browse a selection of author portraits from Writers: Literary Lives in Focus, a collection of two hundred and fifty portraits of literary figures of the twentieth century, from Vladimir Nabokov to William Faulkner. (New Yorker)
