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:
“One reason I talk a lot about my own mind is to show that I’m feeling for the truth, not reporting, not pulling out a pristine file from a drawer. If you’re not showing the edges of your consciousness, you’re not psychologically self-aware enough to write [a memoir].” At the Rumpus, Emma Winsor Wood interviews memoirist and poet Mary Karr about the perception of memoir as the “trashy genre,” as well as how to negotiate with the limits of memory.
A new edition of poems by T. S. Eliot offers a glimpse into the modernist poet’s romantic and sexual life, with the inclusion of previously unpublished poems from his notebooks written to his second wife, Valerie. Faber will release the collection in the United Kingdom in November. (Guardian)
Audiobook publisher Blackstone Audio has launched a print imprint, with its first title, James W. Huston’s thriller The Blood Flag, due out in November. Blackstone plans to release fifteen to twenty titles a year. (Publishers Weekly)
New York–based Polis Books will publish Ted Dawe’s young adult novel Into the River, the first book to be banned in New Zealand in more than twenty years. The book was banned last month after Christian groups sent complaints about the book’s “detailed descriptions of sex acts, coarse language, and scenes of drug-taking.” (GalleyCat)
David Crystal, author of Making a Point: The Persnickety Story of English Punctuation, surveys the Western canon’s most lax and most scrupulous punctuation stylists. William Wordsworth, who admitted he was hopeless with punctuation, used to send his poetry to be copyedited by chemist Humphry Davy. Mark Twain, on the other hand, once wrote in an 1889 letter, “Yesterday Mr. Hall wrote that the printer’s proof-reader was improving my punctuation for me, and I telegraphed orders to have him shot without giving him time to pray.” (Guardian)
“Can some kinds of appropriation shatter stereotypes? This has been literature’s implicit promise: that entering into another’s consciousness enlarges our own.” At the New York Times Magazine, Parul Sehgal considers the ethics of cultural appropriation in literature.
At the Los Angeles Times, David Ulin reviews Patti Smith’s new memoir, M Train, which will be released next week by Knopf. “When she writes of having ‘no task more exceptional than to rescue a fleeting thought, as a tuft of wool, from the combo of the wind,’ she is describing her entire aesthetic, in which the internal becomes externalized, or vice versa, and we find ourselves moving through a landscape that is both utterly real and also strangely magical, one defined by myth and icons…”
Past is Present, the American Antiquarian Society’s blog, rounds up unusual names of nineteenth-century newspapers, including the Sucker and Farmer’s Record, the Horseneck Truth Teller and Gossip Journal, and the Mud Turtle.
