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:
This Saturday, a group of writers led by sci-fi author Chris Farnell will attempt to write an entire novel in seventy-five minutes. The session will take place at the 2015 Nine Worlds Geekfest in London, a convention for “fans across the spectrum of geek culture.” As for the seventy-five minute session’s outcome, Farnell says, “I think coherent, legible and English is a good thing to aim for. This is more about whether it’s possible than about whether it’s going to be a good bit of literature.” (Guardian)
Researchers at Stanford University have developed new software specifically designed to streamline the process of e-mail archive research. The software, called ePADD, is being used to help organize archived e-mail correspondence of prominent writers. (Wall Street Journal)
At the Barnes & Noble Review, fiction writers Kristin Valdez Quade and Mira Jacob discuss their influences, the nature of art, and writing emotional risk. “I do occasionally feel squeamish about writing strong emotions and worry about risking sentimentality. But to me the risk is worth it if I’m getting closer to something true.”
Mad Men fans now have the opportunity to own Don Draper’s books. Props from the show, including the copy of Mario Puzo's The Godfather that Don (Jon Hamm) read in the last season, are currently up for auction. (Los Angeles Times)
The new BBC series Life in Squares dramatizes the relationships and social activities of the Bloomsbury Group, the set of British writers and intellectuals that included Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes. According to author Ed Smith, the pervading mass interest in the Bloomsbury Group lies, paradoxically, in the group’s elitism. (New Statesman)
Sometimes a writer’s productivity does not fit into neatly structured schedule. Novelist Naomi J. Williams shares her process—haphazard, messy, and monomaniacal—at the Farrar, Straus and Giroux Work in Progress blog.
“A truly radical 21st-century novelist wouldn’t ask us to see ourselves in made-up villains, and then, hopefully, revise our opinions of the real ones in our own lives. Rather, they would ask us to see the arduous and often acrobatic effort that goes into living a life of common decency.” At the New York Times, writers Thomas Mallon and Alice Gregory debate the question, Can a virtuous character make for interesting fiction?
CNN’s new list of eighteen of the “World’s coolest bookstores” includes a Taipei–based shop that’s open twenty-four hours a day, and a luxury publisher located in a Venetian palace.
