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:
The March issue of the online poetics journal Evening Will Come features a tribute to late poet C. D. Wright, who passed away in January. The tribute includes poems and remembrances by poets such as Brenda Hillman and Jean Valentine, and an introduction by Susan Briante, Carmen Giménez Smith, and Evan Lavender-Smith.
“Woolson was writing in an age when the idea of first-rate talent in a woman made civilized men sputter. Henry James, unlike Nathaniel Hawthorne, did not say that women should be whipped before they were allowed to publish, but he shared the prejudice.” Writer and critic Vivian Gornick looks back at late-nineteenth-century American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, a writer often discussed in relation to her friendship with Henry James; the recent publication of a biography and a collection of her stories have made her a “figure of some dimension in her own right.” (Nation)
Before the “selfie” there was the “self.” At the Atlantic, a professor considers how Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre introduced the idea of the “modern individual” to nineteenth-century audiences.
Read award-winning author Ann Beattie’s introduction to the new edition of David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel and Other Novels at the Millions. “There is no possibility David Markson would have thought of being fashionable. But without any calculation, David’s writing has come to be considered very of-the-moment.”
At Bookforum, poet David Biespiel writes about musician Iris DeMent’s new album, Requiem, which she wrote in homage to soviet poet Anna Akhmatova.
“A linked collection operates like a mandala, all the parts interrelated, but without a definite origin and without a definite end.” At Publishers Weekly, fiction writer Amy Parker recommends ten linked short story collections that have influenced her work. Parker’s debut story collection, Beasts and Children, is out now from Mariner Books.
In a profile for Vogue, Mexican novelists Álvaro Enrigue and Valeria Luiselli, who are also married, discuss their lives in New York City, the contemporary Mexican fiction scene, and their latest novels, Sudden Death and The Story of My Teeth.
