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:
In April 2017 Scribner will release F. Scott Fitzgerald’s complete unpublished short stories in a collection titled I’d Die for You. The stories, which were written in the mid- and late 1930s, feature “Fitzgerald writing about controversial topics, depicting young men and women who actually spoke and thought more as young men and women did, without censorship.” (Guardian)
Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of UNESCO’s International Literacy Day, which was established in 1966 to “actively mobilize the international community and to promote literacy as an instrument to empower individuals, communities, and societies.” The official global celebration is held at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris.
Tope Folarin, winner of the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing, examines the history of accessibility in African fiction published in English, considering novels by Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Imbolo Mbue. (Los Angeles Review of Books)
Boston-based indie publisher Beacon Press has launched the audiobook imprint Beacon Press Audio. Beginning this fall, the press will simultaneously publish audiobook editions of select new titles; the first title is Jerald Walker’s memoir, The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult. (Publishers Weekly)
At Slate, professional book critic Laura Miller shares what she appreciates about Goodreads and Amazon reader reviews. “The Internet can teach you the infinite variety of ways that a person can experience a book. The novel I regard as brilliant never quite wins the audience I feel it deserves, while the one I wave away as mawkishly overwritten strikes the reading public as wonderful. This happened before the Internet, of course, but now, thanks to reader reviews, I stand a better chance of finding out why.”
We have William Shakespeare to thank for many well-known expressions and words, but certain phrases attributed to the playwright are not, in fact, his coinages. Shakespeare scholar David McInnis investigates the reasons behind these misattributions. (New York Times, Pursuit)
Poet Anaïs Duplan speaks with poet Wendy Xu and artist Jesse Hlebo about the ways in which narratives—global, historical, and familial—are constructed, and the challenge of representing voices often left out of historical narratives. “If I choose not to record [my relative’s] voices, they just won’t end up…in recorded history,” Xu says. “But then I’m, of course, lacking in the ability to experience firsthand these things that happened to my parents or to my other relatives. And so when I represent them, when I give them voice in my writing…it’s a performance.” (Ploughshares)
