T. S. Eliot’s Summer Home to Become Writers Retreat, Reading for Pleasure, and More

by
Staff
3.31.15

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:

T. S. Eliot’s childhood summer home in Gloucester, Massachusetts, was recently acquired by the T. S. Eliot Foundation, a British nonprofit that plans to turn the house into a writers retreat. Director of the foundation Clare Reihill “envisions the house as a writers retreat, hosting five poets, essayists, or playwrights at a time; as a location for symposia on Eliot or poetry; and as a learning center about poetry for schoolchildren.” Reihill hopes the center will open by mid-2016. (Boston Globe)

The Morning News has selected the winner of this year’s Tournament of Books. After five rounds, the tournament champion is Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.

In this week’s installment of the New York Times Bookends series, authors Anna Holmes and Benjamin Moser discuss whether reading for pleasure should be considered crucial or suspect.

“My hunch is that, in the future, well-supported American writers are, for a variety of different and complex reasons, going to do very well out of the Folio and the Booker combined, and that this will have consequences for writing and publishing in this country.” Rachel Cooke, one of the judges for the 2015 Folio Prize for fiction, writes for the Guardian about what she learned about the state of contemporary fiction from judging the award.

The Coral Gables, Florida–based bookstore Books & Books has been named Publishers Weekly’s Independent Bookstore of the Year. The store has operated for thirty-three years, and in that time has opened several satellite locations. The Books & Books flagship store hosts over sixty events per month.

The National Association of College Stores Inc. (NACS), a nonprofit that represents thousands of campus stores across the United States, has filed a lawsuit against Purdue University in Indiana over the school’s contract with Amazon. The NACS claims Purdue failed to disclose contractual information regarding the square footage of Amazon’s stores, the contract’s end, and “content categorized as ‘special programs.’” (Bookseller)

“The writer’s job has become vastly more interactive—family secrets confessed without the cover of fiction, commenters engaged—but this is not because young writers enjoy the business-model approach any more than previous generations did.” At the New Republic, Phoebe Maltz Bovy responds to Cynthia Ozick’s New York Times piece about how young writers today are not “content to wait their turn.”