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:
NBC’s Late Night With Seth Meyers has “morphed into something of an intellectual salon,” with the talk show host featuring more than a dozen author interviews over the past year, from Marlon James to Stephen King. (Wall Street Journal)
“A story switches on some unfathomably sophisticated machine inside us and we see, gloriously, what is not possible.” Fiction writer Ben Marcus praises the power of the short story in his introduction to New American Stories, a new anthology of contemporary shorts edited by Marcus and published tomorrow by Vintage. (Electric Literature)
Recently discovered documents are said to confirm that the presumed bones of poet William Butler Yeats, which were sent from France to Sligo, Ireland, in 1948, are in fact not his remains. (Irish Times)
In Australia, Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 satiric novel American Psycho is censored and must be sold in “a sealed wrapper” to adults over the age of eighteen. A recent batch of the books arrived to Imprints Booksellers in Adelaide without the wrapping, and after a customer complaint police ordered the bookseller to remove the book from the shelves. (GalleyCat)
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kaya Genç discusses a new book by Sophie Hannah that features Hercule Poirot—a character originally conceived by Agatha Christie—and the implications of resurrecting literary characters years after their author’s death.
Harvard Magazine looks at the work of Suzanne Koven, a doctor who is also Massachusetts General Hospital’s first ever writer-in-residence. Koven observes how healthcare professionals can improve their relationships with patients by writing and studying literature. For example, “Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis can teach physicians about the turmoil experienced by a patient’s family members.”
Speaking of the Metamorphosis, in honor of the centennial anniversary of the publication of Franz Kafka’s novella, Richard T. Kelly writes one hundred thoughts about the work. (Guardian)
