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:
BookExpo (BEA), the North American publishing industry’s annual conference, kicked off on Wednesday in New York City. Publishers Weekly reports on some of the most buzz-worthy titles forthcoming this summer and fall, including fiction from Jeffrey Eugenides, Jennifer Egan, Nicole Krauss, and Jesmyn Ward.
“Even if you don’t drink directly from the spring of poetry, you drink from the lake of language the spring has fed and sweetened. Even if you don’t read poetry, I assure you that poetry is whispering to you.” Poet Kathleen Ossip delivers remarks on the power of poetry for a reading she gave at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University last month. (Electric Literature)
Two scholars have discovered a complete play written by Edith Wharton in 1901, when the writer had only published a handful of short stories and poems. The play, The Shadow of a Doubt, revolves around a former nurse married to a gentleman above her social class. (New Yorker)
“I wasn’t that into reading back then, but as I started to read, I felt calmer. The voices, the screaming, and the sirens took a backseat, I just focused on the book. From then on, reading became my way of escaping and understanding the horrors taking place around me.” An eighteen-year-old Syrian refugee shares which books she turned to in times of turmoil and violence. (VICE)
Holland Cotter visits the new exhibit on Henry David Thoreau that opens today at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City and considers the famous transcendentalist’s activism and distrust of the government in a modern light. (New York Times)
A forthcoming edition of T. S. Eliot’s correspondence, which includes letters from his first wife, Vivien Haigh-Wood, and passages from her diary, reveals their difficult separation. In her diaries, Haigh-Wood insists that Eliot has been kidnapped to explain his absence and that the man who met at a lawyer’s office to discuss their separation was an imposter of Eliot. (Guardian)
Poet Larry Fagin died last weekend at the age of eighty. Fagin wrote several poetry collections and was the assistant director of the Poetry Project in New York City. (Harriet)
In the wake of Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the New York Times recommends three books on the climate change debate.
