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:
Amazon has confirmed plans to open another branch of its physical bookstore, Amazon Books, in Chicago next year. The announcement follows the online retailer’s plans to open locations in San Diego and Portland, Oregon; the first location opened in Seattle in 2015. (Chicago Tribune)
In the latest installment of Electric Literature’s “The Writing Life Around the World” series, Daniel Saldaña París shares his experience living as a writer in Mexico City. “Writing in Mexico City is like holding a conversation when you’re under the takeoff and landing path of the city’s airplanes: you have to shut up sometimes, to let the noise take over everything, to let the sky split in two before picking up where you left off.”
According to the free betting website NicerOdds, best-selling novelist Haruki Murakami has the highest odds of winning the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, followed by Adonis and Joyce Carol Oates. Murakami has been favored to receive the prize multiple times, including in 2015, but has not yet won. The 2016 prize-winner will be announced later this year.
Hachette is suing its author Seth Grahame-Smith—writer of the best-selling novels Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter—for delivering a manuscript that the publisher claims “is in large part an appropriation of a one-hundred-twenty-year-old public domain work.” (Guardian)
Actress, director, and writer Lena Dunham announced she is working on her first collection of short stories, Best and Always, to be released by Random House in 2017. (Entertainment Weekly)
Chilean author Alejandro Zambra speaks with the Rumpus about his eighth book, Multiple Choice, a novel examining the complexities of education and the institutional standardization of knowledge. Listen to Zambra read an excerpt of Multiple Choice at the Poets & Writers Page One Podcast.
Contemporary poetry books rarely sell close to a half-million copies, but Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey, released in 2015 by Andrews McMeel Publishing, is one exception. An article at Publishers Weekly examines how Kaur’s debut book became a poetry blockbuster.
