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:
Poet C. K. Williams, whose honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award, died yesterday at age seventy-eight. Williams’s “morally impassioned poems [addressed] war, poverty and climate change, as well as the imponderable mysteries of the psyche,” the New York Times notes. In addition to writing numerous poetry collections, Williams published five works of translation and many critical essays. Tomorrow, Williams’s Selected Later Poems will be released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (New York Times)
Best-selling British novelist Jackie Collins, who authored thirty-two international bestsellers “on glamour, sex, and affairs in Hollywood,” died Saturday from breast cancer. Collins’s books sold more than five hundred millions copies and were translated into forty languages over the course of her career. She was seventy-seven. (Guardian)
More than forty authors—including Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Franzen, and Jennifer Egan—have signed an open letter to China president Xi Jinping calling for the release of Chinese writers who are currently imprisoned. PEN American Center released the letter in advance of the president Jinping’s visit to the United States on September 22. “We urge you to release the Chinese writers and journalists who are languishing in jail for the crime of expressing their opinions, and to take immediate steps to defend and protect the rights of all Chinese citizens to communicate and access information freely,” the letter states.
The HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge—based on the 2008 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Elizabeth Strout—received six Emmy Awards at last night’s ceremony. Actress Frances McDormand starred in the miniseries—and also optioned for the project—and writer Jane Anderson adapted the novel for the screen. (Variety)
At the New York Review of Books, horror master Stephen King considers the work of William Sloane, a contemporary of H. P. Lovecraft whose horror stories eschewed conventions of the genre. “Sloane’s novels are actual works of literature….if one compares these novels to what was then being published in science fiction magazines…what a difference in language, diction, theme, and ambition!” A new edition of Sloane’s The Rim of Morning will be released by New York Review Books Classics on October 6.
“I’d rather risk sentimentality than not [say] anything.” Poet Ada Limón talks with the Rumpus Poetry Book Club about her new collection Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions), which is longlisted for the National Book Award in poetry. Listen to Limón read from the book as part of the Poets & Writers Page One podcast series.
Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of 1,689 libraries in the United States from 1883 to 1929. Currently, there are roughly 1,500 Carnegie libraries in existence. Author and professor Sam Weller, a self-professed “library geek,” is on a quest to visit all of them. (Huffington Post)
