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:
Margaret Atwood’s 1985 best-selling novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, is set to be adapted into a drama series. Elizabeth Moss will star, and Atwood will serve as a consulting producer. The series will be available to stream on Hulu in 2017. (Verge)
At Bookforum, Karan Mahajan interviews fiction writer Adam Ehrilch Sachs about his debut collection, Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables, and Problems; his influences and the fragmentary structure of the work; and the emotional risk involved in his project.
An article at the Boston Globe reports on how Boston-based publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has approached dealing with its profits and royalties over the years from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The publisher first printed the infamous screed in the United States in 1933.
Poet Wendy Xu talks about her work and her ideas of what a poem should do in an interview at DiveDapper. “How do you test a poem? I’m not sure. Maybe the lab is each reader’s world of interpersonal relationships. The poem tries to offer a kinder reality, and the reader has the good fortune of testing that reality out for themselves. Living out various proposals for empathy.”
Poet, anti-war activist, and Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan died on Saturday at age ninety-four. Berrigan, who won the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1957, rose to national attention when he and eight others—known as the Catonsville Nine—were imprisoned in 1968 for burning hundreds of draft records in protest of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. (New York Times)
“For darkness restores what the light cannot repair.” Essayist Kathryn Harrison discusses how that particular line from Joseph Brodsky’s poem “On Love” defines “Writing the way I experience it. For me, writing is a process that demands cerebral effort, but it’s also one informed by the unconscious. And through that dark, opaque process, I can restore what might otherwise be lost.” (Atlantic)
