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:
HarperCollins will publish a new book by late Lord of the Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien in May 2017. Beren and Lúthien, the “story of the love between a mortal man and an immortal elf,” was originally written in 1917. (Telegraph)
At the end of November, Christie’s will auction off the gun with which French poet Paul Verlaine shot poet Arthur Rimbaud in 1873. The revolver is expected to fetch up to 60,000 euros. (Guardian)
Entries open today for one of the world’s newest, and richest, book prizes—for a book that has yet to be written. The $100,000 Nine Dots Prize is open to any writer over the age of eighteen writing in English. Instead of submitting a book, applicants submit a three-thousand-word essay answering the question: “Are digital technologies making politics impossible?” The essay will form the basis for a book, which will be published by Cambridge University Press. (Newsweek)
Fiction writer Ben Fountain talks with Texas Monthly about the new film adaptation of his award-winning novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. The film, directed by Ang Lee and starring Vin Diesel, Steve Martin, and Kristen Stewart, comes to theaters November 11.
Happy eighty-seventh birthday to Ursula K. Le Guin! On Tuesday, Saga Press released a collection of the author’s novellas, The Found and the Lost, alongside a story collection, The Unreal and the Real. Le Guin recently spoke with Publishers Weekly about her latest publications.
“A work with characters who grapple with the effects of age doesn’t need to be confined to the morbid or elegiac.” Fiction writer Tobias Carroll considers various treatments of the elderly and the aging in a range of novels. (Literary Hub)
At Signature Reads, fiction writer Janice Y. K. Lee discusses her second novel, The Expatriates, which recounts the experiences of three expatriate women living in Hong Kong. Lee’s own experience of growing up in Hong Kong with Korean expatriate parents, and later attending school in America before moving back to Hong Kong, inspired the world of the novel.
“Those poor heights. They were wuthering. Wuthering so bad. Bigly wuthering. I’ll make them great again.” Following St. Louis mayoral candidate Antonio French’s Tweet during Wednesday night’s presidential debate in which he compared Donald Trump’s foreign policy answers to an unprepared teenager giving a book report, the #TrumpBookReport hashtag has gone viral. (GalleyCat)
