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:
The shortlist for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for Fiction has been announced. The annual prize is given for a work of fiction by a writer from any country translated into English and published in the U.K. in the previous year.
“Language is a kind of estrangement in this book. Silence is fertile and full, and language—used conventionally—can feel like a reduction, a narrowing, of what is ample and in flux.” Poet Jenny Xie discusses the anxiety of bilingualism, reading as a migratory act, and her debut collection, Eye Level, which won the Academy of American Poets’ 2017 Walt Whitman Award. (BOMB)
Listen to Xie read a poem from Eye Level in the new episode of Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast.
The remains of Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge have been rediscovered in a wine cellar beneath St. Michael’s church in London. (Guardian)
“As a teacher he could be gruff and imposing, but he was thrilling, too, passionate, funny, and challenging, committed to initiating his students into the rigors that poetry demanded.” Alexandra Schwartz recalls studying poetry under J. D. McClatchy, who died this week at age seventy-two. (New Yorker)
HBO is set to adapt the late Heather McNamara’s true crime book, I’ll Be Gone In the Dark, into a documentary series. McNamara, who was the wife of comedian Patton Oswalt, died while in the process of completing the book. (Uproxx)
“John Donne’s verse may be erotic, but his meaning is ingeniously encoded in metaphorical conceit; Rochester, on the other hand, was the first English poet to fully reject euphemism.” John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, was “the Restoration’s filthiest poet.” (Jstor Daily)
At a time when the literacy rate for women was around 40 percent, Sarah Fielding’s 1749 children’s novel The Governess taught girls the values of education. (Smithsonian)
