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:
An epic performance of an epic poem has begun. The British Museum and the Almeida Theater are presenting a marathon reading of Homer’s Greek epic poem The Iliad. You can stream the sixteen-hour reading, which features performances from more than sixty actors and artists, live on the Almeida Theater website. (Independent)
A 1927 essay by T. S. Eliot titled “The Contemporary Novel” has been published in English for the first time in the Times Literary Supplement. In the essay, which was originally published in a French journal, Eliot explores the “bewildering diversity of forms and contents of the contemporary novel in England and America,” and critiques the likes of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, David Garnett, and Aldous Huxley.
Vandals set fire to a Little Free Library structure in Denver this week. The book exchange structure contained nearly forty books, most of which were destroyed. Community members are angered and confused by the act of vandalism, but are working to replace to structure as soon as possible. (Los Angeles Times)
The White House recently released President Obama’s summer reading list, which includes fiction by Jhumpa Lahiri and Anthony Doerr, and nonfiction by Ta-Nehisi Coates. (Washington Post)
Speaking of Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Between the World and Me author shares his wide-ranging literary preferences for the New York Times By the Book series. “I don’t really understand how anyone could be a writer and ‘avoid’ any genre. It seems contrary to the very idea of writing, to discovery, to understanding. I read whatever I can, whenever I can.”
An adaptation of Lydia Davis’s forward for A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin—out this month from Farrar, Straus & Giroux—is up at the New Yorker. Of Berlin’s stories, Davis writes, “Nothing is predictable. And yet everything is also natural, true to life, true to our expectations of psychology and emotion.”
At Literary Hub, novelist Claire Messud discusses her reasons for writing and the importance of creating art to systematically process an ever-expanding, overwhelming world. “I realized that in making up stories, as in reading stories, I could create a contained world in which an experience is shared in its entirety.”
