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 American Writers Museum is slated to open in Chicago in the spring of 2017. The museum is the first in the country dedicated to celebrating the achievements and influence of American writers, and the 2017 opening will follow five years of planning and fund-raising. (Guardian)
At Asymptote, writers and translators Sue Burke and Maia Evrona discuss the ideal way to write reviews of works in translation. An ideal review, Burke says, “might compare a passage of the original to the translation and note whether the translation wrestles successfully (or not) with linguistic and cultural challenges, captures its literary quality like elegance or immediacy or wit, and accurately conveys both the meaning and subtext.”
The New Yorker’s Dan Chiasson compares the poetry of two “Boston Boys:” John Wieners and John Updike. Chiasson writes, “No two human beings seem more different,” and yet, “the parceling of the world into overlapping zones of propriety and perversity, and the use of poetry as a means of travelling between those regions, unite them.”
In an interview at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Stephen King talks about defying genre boundaries, how his novels have translated across different media, his public reputation over the years, and thinking of himself as a “proletarian novelist.”
Meanwhile, at the Millions, fiction writer Angela Flournoy talks about her writing process, diversity in publishing, and being nominated for a National Book Award for her debut novel, The Turner House.
In fairytales and folklore, why is evil often characterized by an old woman? At NPR, a writer traces the roots of the evil figure to a general fear of female power.
The New York Times has analyzed the speaking styles of the presidential candidates to match them with the books they sound like. In case you were wondering, Ted Cruz is Beowulf, Hillary Clinton is Persuasion, and Donald Trump is The Legend of King Arthur.
