The Rise of Climate Fiction, Finding Work-Life Balance as a Writer, and More

by
Staff
8.17.15

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:

To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Little, Brown is holding a contest for readers to design a cover for the new edition, with a prize of $1,000. (Paris Review)

Meanwhile, NPR has republished David Foster Wallace’s 1997 Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross, which followed the paperback release of Infinite Jest.

Yesterday, the New York Times published a piece investigating the company practices and work conditions of e-tail giant Amazon, which revealed a cutthroat environment where empathy is a sign of weakness and employees are forced to work long hours, among other grim details. Some so-called Amazonians, however, including founder CEO Jeff Bezos, replied with rebuttals and criticized the article as inaccurate. (Shelf Awareness)

As the genre’s presence in college curriculums increases, climate fiction, or “cli fi,”—a subgenre of science fiction that examines environmental issues—can be a valuable tool in engaging younger readers to think about the Earth’s sustainability. (Atlantic)

At Blunt Instrument, Electric Literature’s monthly advice column, poet Elisa Gabbert responds to a reader’s question of how to find a literary community and achieve work-life balance as a writer after leaving an MFA program.

Ann Rice is fed up with online criticism of controversial books. The best-selling novelist spoke out against the criticism of Kate Breslin’s romance novel For Such a Time, which has been called “antisemitic, violent, and dangerous,” in online reviews, as it tells the story of a Jewish woman in a concentration camp who falls in love with a Nazi commander and eventually converts to Christianity. Rice said that the hostility towards this book is “a perfect example of the new censorship,” though she admittedly has yet to read the book. (Guardian)

Over at Guernica, Israeli author Etgar Keret talks about writing his first memoir, The Seven Good Years; living as a child of Holocaust survivors; and finding freedom through writing.I think living in Israel and wanting to change reality is the best prescription for never-ending writer’s block.”