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:
Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher and one of the most well-known Marxist scholars of the twenty-first century, was recently accused by conservative bloggers of plagiarizing from the American Renaissance [2], a magazine focusing on “race and racial conflict” that the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a white nationalist hate group. The author of more than seventy books, Žižek has denied any wrongdoing in several e-mails to NPR [3]. (Newsweek)
Nobel Prize–winning author Nadine Gordimer has died at age ninety [4] in her home in Johannesburg, South Africa. A prolific novelist and short-story writer, Gordimer was also a defender of civil rights in her home country, where the apartheid government banned three of her books and a collection of poetry she edited. (Guardian)
Vincent Zandri, a mystery author and Amazon publishing success story, refuses to take sides in the ongoing Hachette-Amazon battle [5]. While defending the Internet retailer that made him a financial success after a traditional contract went sour, Zandri notes that the company should not be allowed to become a monopoly. (New York Times)
Meanwhile, ten-year-old Jake Mayer of Chicago is at work on his second novel this summer, after self-publishing his first, A Tale of Friends, Enemies, and Minecraft, through Amazon's CreateSpace last year. The book, which Mayer wrote as a school project for National Novel Writing Month, has sold fourteen thousand copies [6] through Amazon. (CBS)
Independent bookseller Browseabout Books in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, is distributing free copies of the young adult novel The Miseducation of Cameron Post [7], by Emily M. Danforth, after the board of the local Cape Henlopen School District removed the book from its reading list for incoming freshmen. The book is a coming-of-age tale concerning a young woman’s recognition of her sexual identity. (Shelf Awareness)
Meanwhile, the Mexican government has donated more than 1,600 Spanish-language textbooks [8] to prisoners in Arizona, where many who participate in educational programing speak Spanish as a first language. (AZFamily)
Valerie Macon has been appointed the new state poet laureate of North Carolina [9]. The author of the collections Shelf Life and Sleeping Rough will serve in the position for two years, succeeding Joseph Bathanti. (WRAL.com)
Book Riot offers a pictorial history of American bookmobiles [10]—from a horse-drawn wagon that served Maryland's Washington County until 1910 to Memphis’s advanced digital book trailer.