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:
Amazon has named Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad the best book of 2016. Amazon’s annual “Best Books” list includes the top hundred titles selected by the company’s editorial staff. Whitehead’s novel is also a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction, which will be announced tomorrow evening at a ceremony in New York City.
A teaser trailer has been released for the upcoming James Baldwin documentary, I Am Not Your Negro. The film envisions the book that Baldwin left unfinished at the time of his death, “Remember This House,” using Baldwin’s original words and archives to produce “a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America…into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter.” A release date has been set for February 3, 2017. (Magnolia Pictures)
Meanwhile, ahead of tomorrow’s National Book Awards ceremony, National Book Foundation director Lisa Lucas speaks with the Miami Herald about this year’s awards and finalists.
At the Times Literary Supplement, fiction writer and translator Lydia Davis discusses underrated writers, which of her contemporaries might be read a hundred years from now, and the books she would like to write her own versions of: “Strangely enough, some of them are gigantic, like Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project.”
Speaking of the German literary critic Walter Benjamin, Barry Schwabsky considers Benjamin’s lesser-known sonnets. The poems, written in 1915, were inspired by Benjamin’s friendship with the poet Christoph Friedrich Heinle. The only English translation of Sonnets was published last year by Publication Studio. (Hyperallergic)
Emma Froggatt reports for the Guardian about the rise of digital book clubs and their celebrity leaders, who include actress Emma Watson and singer Florence Welch.
On a recent episode of NBC’s Late Night With Seth Meyers, Neil Gaiman explained how boredom is powerful tool for aspiring writers. (Lifehacker)
The literary world continues to celebrate and pay tribute to poet and musician Leonard Cohen, who passed away November 7 at age eighty-two. Signature features a list of ten books by or about Cohen, as well as works by Cohen’s major poetic influences, such as Walt Whitman and Federico García Lorca.
