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:
Disclosures of government sponsored phone and Internet surveillance has increased sales of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four [2]. (Wall Street Journal)
One page of Charlotte Brontë's French homework [3] (on the topic of filial love) fetched almost eighty thousand dollars in a private sale. The work was discovered last year in a personal library. (Guardian)
Novelist and poet Sherman Alexie sparked a Twitter deluge [4] with this short statement: “Grammar cops are rarely good writers. Imagination always disobeys.” (GalleyCat)
Narrative 4, a storytelling nonprofit, launched recently in partnership with Esquire. To celebrate, Byliner has new fiction from Narrative 4 contributors Adam Haslett, Amy Bloom, Patrick McGrath, and Ayana Mathis [5].
In a photo essay, Charlie Savage looks at the libraries of Guantanamo Bay [6] detention camp. (New York Times)
For the Paris Review Daily, Sadie Stein reads Lydia Davis’s “Local Obits. [7]”
Fashion boutique Aritzia asked Slaughterhouse 90210 creator Maris Kreizman to pair famed locations [8] in New York City with passages from favorite literature.
If you’re sending a kid off to their last day of school this week, author Dani Shapiro shares her thoughts about transitional moments [9] and the writing life.