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:
If you, like pretty much every book enthusiast, have ever fantasized about running a bookstore, now’s your chance. Airbnb is offering guests the opportunity to run a bookstore in Scotland. The Open Book is located in the Scottish seaside town of Wigtown, otherwise known as “Scotland’s National Book Town.” Guests can rent the store and apartment above it for £150 (plus a £30 cleaning fee) per week. (GalleyCat)
Speaking of bookstores, in an effort to combat the dominance of online retailers like Amazon, a major Japanese bookstore chain is buying 90 percent of the first print run of Haruki Murakami’s new essay collection. The chain, Kinokuniya, which has more than sixty stores in Japan, is set to acquire 90,000 copies of the 100,000-copy print run of Murakami’s forthcoming Novelist As a Vocation, which is out on September 10. (Guardian)
The poet Cynthia Macdonald, whose work is known for both its humor and its ability to shock, has died. She was eighty-seven. (New York Times)
At Duke University, some incoming freshmen have refused to read Alison Bechdel’s award-winning graphic novel Fun Home, which was assigned as a summer read, due to its “pornographic nature.” (CNN)
“Some writers compose convoluted, hard-to-read sentences because they don’t have the chops to make simpler ones.” In this week’s installment of the New York Times Bookends series, authors Zoë Heller and Leslie Jamison discuss whether we overvalue difficulty in literature, mistaking inaccessibility for brilliance.
Morrissey’s debut novel, List of the Lost, will be published by Penguin UK next month. The novel follows the release of the singer’s memoir, Autobiography, which was published in 2013. (Independent)
“I’m still not the best at anything. Not the smartest, most talented, prettiest, strongest; not the best traveler, best novelist; not the best at foreign languages and not the best yogi. Not the best at anything. But my heavens, I do show up.” At Good Housekeeping, Elizabeth Gilbert, the best-selling author of Eat, Pray, Love, explains her secret to success.
