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:
“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists…. It is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.” Rebecca Solnit writes about what it means to hope during disillusioning and dark times. (Guardian)
For all the readers stumped by James Joyce’s Ulysses, a bevy of recent apps, podcasts, and websites are here to help decode the modernist masterpiece. One website offers a graphic adaptation of the novel; another app, “He Liked Thick Word Soup,” invites players to untangle sentences from the book; and one filmmaker is even adapting part of the novel into a virtual-reality film. (New York Times)
Speaking of augmented and virtual reality—multiple bookstores have reported increased foot traffic, and possibly sales, from people playing Pokémon Go. (Publishers Weekly)
In other bookstore news, Annie Correal looks into the book quiz that all prospective employees at the Strand, New York City’s largest independent bookstore, must take to be hired. The bookstore, which employs around two hundred people, receives approximately sixty job applications each week. (New York Times)
Bernie Sanders will publish a book with St. Martin Press. “Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In” will be released on November 15, one week after the general presidential election. (GalleyCat)
Meanwhile, Alexander Nazaryan contemplates Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” in relation to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and his promises to build a wall on the U.S.–Mexico border. The speaker in Frost’s poem says, “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offense.” (Los Angeles Times)
“At times, Tsiang seemed, like his fictional creation, a mere ‘nut,’ alone in the streets. But the American epic of his own life would become far stranger than anything he dreamed up in his novels, taking him from the streets of New York to an Ellis Island detention hall, to Hollywood, and, finally, to a file buried deep in the archives of the F.B.I.” Hua Hsu profiles the actor and writer H. T. Tsiang, who immigrated to America from China in 1899 and self-published a number of books. (New Yorker)
T Magazine has published portions of an e-mail correspondence between actress Natalie Portman and author Jonathan Safran Foer, the latter who will publish his third novel, Here I Am, in September.
