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:
Because of the ongoing civil war in Syria, the number of Syrian refugees in Istanbul has increased dramatically over the last four years. Samer al-Kadri, who moved to Istanbul from Damascus last year, saw a need for an Arabic bookstore and opened Pages, a bookstore he hopes will become a “cultural mixing zone for Turks and Arabs.” (NPR)
For the second year in a row, Washington D.C.–based independent bookstore Politics & Prose will be the official bookseller at the National Book Festival on September 5. Before last year, only large chain bookstores had been the booksellers at the event, which is sponsored by the Library of Congress. (Shelf Awareness)
Would you like to own a piece of rock and roll poetic history? Paddle8 is auctioning off a poem fragment written by Jim Morrison, the lead singer of 1960s rock band The Doors. The poem was written on the last page of Morrison’s notebook, which was found at the Paris hotel where he died in 1971. The page, which you can bid on through June 25, is expected to sell for between sixty and eighty thousand dollars. (Pollstar)
If you’re not a fan of The Doors, an archive of previously unpublished writings by late British poet Ted Hughes is due to be auctioned off on June 24. The collection includes sketches, poems, and letters Hughes wrote to his friends, which are said to show “an affectionate and generous side” of the poet. (Guardian)
Here’s a reason not to give up on your writing after receiving a rejection: Scottish author John Spurling has won a £25,000 literary prize for a book that was rejected forty-four times before being published last year by the Overlook Press. Spurling took home the 2015 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for his novel The Ten Thousand Things, which took the author fifteen years to complete. (Daily Record)
Amazon has reached a new sales agreement with Penguin Random House in both the United States and the United Kingdom. In May, it was speculated that Penguin Random House would pull its titles from Amazon if the publisher and e-tailer failed to reach an agreement over e-book sales terms. Details of the agreement have yet to be disclosed. (Publishers Weekly)
The genre of nature writing has expanded significantly in Britain over the last decade, with books like Michael McCarthy’s The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy and Helen Macdonald’s award-winning H Is for Hawk achieving success. At New Statesman, Mark Cocker asks, “Why is ‘new nature writing’ so tame?”
In the latest installment of the Atlantic’s By Heart series, Book of Numbers author Joshua Cohen discusses Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novella The Double, his attraction to authors who write themselves into their works, and the complexity and crises of writing a novel in the age of Internet saturation.
