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:
Madonna has signed on to direct the film adaptation of Rebecca Walker’s first novel, Adé: A Love Story. The daughter of Alice Walker, Rebecca Walker wrote two memoirs before penning her novel, the story of an interracial romance set on an island near Kenya. (Los Angeles Times)
In response to novelist and essayist Kiese Laymon’s comments during the recent Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, journalist Jarvis DeBerry considers the question of black male behavior in a world of disciplinarians. (Times-Picayune)
The Royal Canadian Mint has celebrated Alice Munro’s recent Nobel Prize win by donating ten thousand dollars to the Writers’ Trust of Canada and by issuing a series of limited edition five-dollar coins that feature a passage from Munro’s short story “The Messenger.” Munro was presented with one of the silver coins, which will be sold for $69.95 Canadian. (CBC)
Scribd has added a travel category to their e-book subscription service, introducing guide books as part of a partnership with publisher Lonely Planet. (GalleyCat)
The Paris Review recommends the work of travel writers Paul Theroux, Jan Morris, Peter Matthiessen, and Ryszard Kapuściński, whose innovation has reshaped the genre.
Meanwhile, Slate celebrates the long-awaited release of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s posthumously published memoir The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos, the final volume in the author’s account of walking across Europe as a teenager in the 1930s.
An unpublished Tennessee Williams short story, “Crazy Nights,” will also be published after an eighty year wait in the spring issue of literary magazine the Strand. (Guardian)
Classmates of the late Robert Webb Brame Sr., a writer based in Charlotte, North Carolina, have joined together to publish their friend’s novel, With High Hopes a New Day Begins. (Charlotte Observer)
