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:
Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient has won the Golden Man Booker Award, a onetime prize given to the greatest-ever winner of the Man Booker Prize, which has been awarded for fifty years. Ondaatje was selected by fan vote from a group of five finalists. (Washington Post)
A scholar has identified a group of previously lost letters from poet W. B. Yeats to his publishers. The letters were stolen in the 1970s and were recently and anonymously returned to Princeton University Library. (Guardian)
The app Libib allows users to catalog their own book collections by scanning the books’ barcode into the app and adding notes. (Lifehacker)
“How much racial identity is enough? How much is too much? At times, Logan seems frustrated that Vuong has an identity at all…” Paisley Rekdal pushes back against William Logan’s review of Ocean Vuong’s debut poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, and considers critics’ “narrow perceptions of immigrant and war-affected identities.” (Margins)
The owner of Black Swan Books in Richmond, Virginia, called the police after a woman confronted Steve Bannon in the store, calling the former White House strategist a “piece of trash.” (Richmond Times-Dispatch)
Alexandra Alter reports on the slowly changing landscape of romance novels, as “more diverse writers break into the genre, and publishers take chance on love stories that reflect a broader range of experiences and don’t always fit the stereotypical girl-meets-boy mold.” (New York Times)
Atlas Obscura asks readers to share the “best note, doodle, or scribble you’ve ever found in a used or borrowed book.”
“What I really wanted to write about was the darker side of the female psyche. You know—female violence and female rage—what made us do bad things, why we messed up, why we became violent and particularly what that looked like generationally.” Novelist Gillian Flynn on her mystery novel Sharp Objects, which has been adapted into an HBO series starring Amy Adams. (NPR)
