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:
The National Book Foundation has announced the longlist for the 2014 National Book Award in Nonfiction. The longlist in poetry was announced yesterday. (New York Times)
In other award news, graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel, poet Terrance Hayes, and poet and translator Khaled Mattawa are among the recipients of this year’s MacArthur “Genius” grants. Each winner will receive a “no strings attached” grant of $625,000. (Millions)
“…I try hard to make my way back outside of myself to the wider world, and to share what I've figured out.” Bechdel, meanwhile, talks to NPR about her inspirations, how she came to cartooning, and what it means to lay bare the truths of both her own life and the lives of others in her work.
Comics will be the focus of this year’s Banned Books Week, presented by the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression from September 21 to September 27. “This year we spotlight graphic novels because, despite their serious literary merit and popularity as a genre, they are often subject to censorship,” said Judith Platt, chair of the Banned Books Week National Committee. (GalleyCat)
“My hope was to spur a long-overdue conversation about why we need a beautiful savage game to feel united as a country, and fully alive.” Steve Almond discusses the hate mail—and the letters of support—he has received since the publication of his latest book, Against Football (Melville House, 2014), in which he criticizes America’s most beloved, and most brutal, sport. (Cognoscenti)
Algorithmic artist and theorist Daniel Temkin has teamed up with writer and artist Rony Maltz to create the Borges Library, a gigantic projected word-search containing every word that Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges ever wrote, both in his native Spanish and in English translation. (Motherboard)
“Facing the deluge, don’t we need—more than ever—our education, our discernment, our sensitivity, everything of civilization that survives in our poor Facebook-rotted and Twitter-colonized brains?” In the latest installment of the New York Times bookend series, critic James Parker talks with writer Adam Kirsch about what, if anything, makes up good literary taste.
