Sports Poems, Translating Clarice Lispector, and More

by
Staff
12.7.15

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:

At the New York Times, novelist Teddy Wayne argues that having a household full of print books is the best thing parents can do for their children’s intellectual development. “Poking through physical artifacts…is archival and curatorial; it forces you to examine each object slowly, perhaps sample it and come across a serendipitous discovery. Scrolling through file names on a device, on the other hand, is what we do all day long, often mindlessly, in our quest to find whatever it is we’re already looking for as rapidly as possible.”

Asymptote features an interview with Katrina Dodson, translator of The Complete Stories by Brazilian short story writer Clarice Lispector. Dodson discusses spending two years translating and interpreting nearly four decades of Lispector’s work.

Nonfiction writer Geoff Dyer, along with several other authors, shares his thoughts about genre-defying works and the shifting lines between fiction and nonfiction. Dyer received the 2015 Windham-Campbell prize for nonfiction. (Guardian)

“Jane knew what her husband should do with his life: he should write. And she seems to have made it her first mission as his spouse to convince him of that.” Writer Ginger Strand considers the influence Kurt Vonnegut’s first wife, Jane Cox, had on his career. (New Yorker)

Poet Sandeep Parmar reflects on her experience as a woman of color in an MFA program in the United Kingdom and considers the current state of contemporary poetry in Britain. “Contemporary British poetry lacks a vocabulary to speak about race, and a willingness to be critical, despite this happening elsewhere in literary and cultural studies.” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

In honor of NBA all-star Kobe Bryant’s decision to announce his retirement in a poem, poet Adrienne Raphel created a March Madness–style “tournament” of sixteen sports poems over at the Poetry Foundation, with accompanying explanations of each matchup, including Randall Jarrell’s “Say Goodbye to Big Daddy,” William Carlos Williams’s “The Crowd at the Ball Game,” and A. E. Houseman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young.” 

Wally Lamb, author of the best-selling novels I Know This Much Is True and We Are Water, will release his sixth novel, I’ll Take You There, next year exclusively as an interactive digital book app by Metabook, a new e-book publishing company. Publishing novels as apps is a relatively new practice, and Lamb’s novel will be Metabook’s first title, after which the company aims to release six to twelve titles per year in a range of genres. (New York Times)