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:
On Sunday it was announced that H. P. Lovecraft will no longer be the model for the World Fantasy Award trophy. The announcement follows a petition launched last year to change the trophy’s likeness due to Lovecraft’s alleged racism, and stated that “many writers have spoken out about their discomfort with winning an award that lauds someone with such hideous opinions.” (Guardian)
The Instapoets are coming. The New York Times highlights a “new generation of young, digitally astute poets” whose fans on online platforms including Instagram and Tumblr have helped “catapult them onto the best-seller lists, where poetry books are scarce.”
At Flashpoint, Pierre Joris, longtime translator of Paul Celan’s poetry, discusses his relationship with Celan’s work, and his new bilingual translation, Breathturn Into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Meanwhile, novelist and essayist Valeria Luiselli talks about her new novel The Story of My Teeth, working with a translator, and how a life of traveling and moving taught her to occupy the space of an observer in her work. “I have always been either a newcomer or someone who is about to leave, so that intermediate, almost ghostly position has always defined both my relationships to people and space. Writing from that particular position can be a great handicap or a vantage point, depending on how you see it.” (Rumpus)
“As long as there is life in shards, there will be short stories to describe them.” At the National, a writer considers the endurance of the short story form.
Wall Street Journal Magazine has named Karl Ove Knausgaard the winner of its 2015 Literary Innovator award, and features a sprawling profile of the My Struggle author. Knausgaard admits, “I think people almost vomit when they hear my name because I’m so often in the news.”
Pulitzer Prize–winning author David K. Shipler discusses what it was like to have his book, The Working Poor: Invisible in America, banned from a Texas high school English curriculum. (New York Times)
It’s now the second week of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). If you’re looking for more motivational tips to complete those fifty thousand words before the month ends, perhaps you’d like to try the masochistic Write or Die program and app, which motivates its users to write with “various stimuli and punishments.” (Mashable)
