National Book Awards to be Announced Wednesday, Lena Dunham’s Girls Character Attends the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and More

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:

Today marks the beginning of NBA week, and we’re not talking about basketball. The 65th annual National Book Awards will be announced this Wednesday, November 19, in a ceremony hosted by Daniel Handler (also known as Lemony Snicket). Head over to the National Book Foundation site for author interviews as well as a complete list of the finalists in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and stay tuned to the Grants & Awards Blog for coverage on awards day.

Musician Mark Ronson and novelist Michael Chabon are currently collaborating on Ronson’s forthcoming album. At the Guardian, John Dugdale discusses the writer-musician collaboration, and argues that the term “collaboration” has changed its meaning in this context over time. “A novelist, playwright or poet providing words for someone else to turn into music and perform, although it is a model inherited from opera and musicals in earlier eras, is now surprisingly rare.”

Publisher, author, and founder of the Choose Your Own Adventure book series R. A. Montgomery has died. Before his success with the young adult series beginning in 1977, Montgomery worked as a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, founded a summer school for children with learning challenges, and also cofounded the publishing company Vermont Crossroads Press. He was 78. (GalleyCat)

For a creative boost, take a walk! Or a saunter, if you will. Read Maria Popova’s introduction to Henry David Thoreau’s 1861 essay, Walking, in which Thoreau reminds us how the "primal act of mobility connects us with our essential wildness, that spring of spiritual vitality methodically dried up by our sedentary civilization.” Bonus: You can download the e-book for free. It’s the perfect sauntering companion. (BrainPickings)

The Iowa Writers' Workshop gets the Girls treatment. The trailer for the new season of HBO’s Girls—written and directed by Lena Dunham—features the main character Hannah (played by Dunham) attending the MFA program at the University of Iowa. In the trailer, Hannah does “what many MFA students do: Marvels at her new surroundings, embarrasses herself in a workshop, drinks to excess.” (Los Angeles Times)

The French government recently declared books an “essential good.” At the New York Times, writers Daniel Mendelsohn and Mohsin Hamid debate whether or not it would be wise for the United States government to declare the same.

“For a work titled The 50 Year Argument, the film is wrapped in a thick wadding of consensus about the brilliance of the NYRB and its two (and remarkably, only two) editors, Robert Silvers and the late Barbara Epstein, with no real arguments adduced about that or the political, literary or cultural positions it has taken over the past half-century.” Read Gerald Howard’s review of Martin Scorsese’s documentary about the New York Review of Books over at n+1.