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 bluff American executive had a soul as baroque and fantastical as an aesthete’s, as profound and brooding as a philosopher’s.” A new biography of modernist poet Wallace Stevens leaves the reader with, according to Adam Kirsch, a “portrait of a man floating, detached.” “The problem with Stevens as a biographical subject is that, unlike many other modernists, he did not publicize either his religious or his artistic struggles.” (Atlantic)
In an interview at NPR, fiction writer Helen Oyeyemi talks about her new story collection, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, as well as her fascination with fairy tales: “I am trying to find out what endures—because these stories are so old, and have been retold by so many tellers, in so many different forms…when you retell a story, you’re testing what in it is relevant to all times and places. Bits of it hold up, and bits of it crumble and then new perspectives come through, and I like that the fairy tale is one of the only stories that can bear the weight of all that.”
The Chronicle of Higher Education features a report on the growing popularity of the subfield climate fiction studies in colleges across the country.
“I try to find a place in the syntax where it almost falls apart, where it’s as extreme as it can get, really, before it breaks.” At the Rumpus, poet Robyn Schiff discusses her influences, poetics, emotional and factual accuracy, and her third collection, A Woman of Property, which was published earlier this month by Penguin.
Speaking of Robyn Schiff, her new collection is on Bustle’s list of thirteen poetry books to read for National Poetry Month, which begins in April. Why not get a head start and check it out now?
The trailer for the Ernest Hemingway biopic, Papa: Hemingway in Cuba, has been unveiled. Papa was the first feature film shot in Cuba in over fifty years. A theatrical release date has been set for April 29. (Hollywood Reporter)
Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, author of the best-selling Neapolitan novels, will release a “dark, fable-like children’s book” titled The Beach at Night in December. Aimed at readers ages six to ten, the story is told from the perspective of a lost doll, and includes twelve color illustrations by Italian artist Mara Cerri. Ann Goldstein will translate the book into English. (Wall Street Journal)
