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:
Barack and Michelle Obama have unveiled initial design plans for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago’s Jackson Park, which will include the first completely digital presidential library [2]. (Chicago Tribune)
The tenth annual Best Translated Book Award [3] winners have been announced. Alejandra Pizarnik’s Extracting the Stone of Madness [4], translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert, won in poetry; and Lúcio Cardoso’s Chronicle of the Murdered House [5], translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, won in fiction. The two $10,000 prizes are split equally between authors and translators. (Publishers Weekly)
For Short Story Month, the San Francisco Chronicle features reviews of three new story collections by immigrant writers [6]: Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People (winner of the inaugural Restless Books Prize for Immigrant Writing), Kanishk Tharoor’s Swimmer Among the Stars, and Osama Alomar’s The Teeth of the Comb & Other Stories.
At PBS NewsHour, Elizabeth Flock considers a new anthology of poetry and prose by writers from West Virginia [7]. Doug Van Gundy, coeditor of the anthology, says the selected writing “combats stereotypes from a state like this—that it’s a place of lesser sophistication, of lower literacy, conservative in all the worst ways instead of the best ways.” Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry From West Virginia, is available now from West Virginia University Press.
Touted as “Oprah’s Book Club for millennials,” [8] the book recommendation engine from theSkimm [9]—a daily news digest “rewritten for a millennial audience”—has helped drive book sales, and publishers are taking notice. (Business Insider)
Kevin Kwan, author of the international best-selling fiction trilogy Crazy Rich Asians, is currently writing a television adaptation [10] of the series for STXtv. Details have not been disclosed, but the premise will involve a set of “globe-trotting, multinational, glamorous” characters, similar to those in Kwan’s trilogy. A film adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians is currently in production in Singapore and Malaysia. (Hollywood Reporter)
Meanwhile, The Girl on the Train author Paula Hawkins [11] talks with the Los Angeles Times about film adaptations, writing troubled women characters, and her new novel, Into the Water, out now from Riverhead Books.