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:
At Shelf Awareness, several booksellers respond to the news of Amazon opening its first physical bookstore. One reviewer who visited the bookstore yesterday in Seattle noted, “After an hour, you’ve seen it all. For all the fanfare about Amazon’s first physical bookshop, Amazon customers might soon realize that it’s just easier to get it online.”
The works of Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe are still widely read today, but what about best-selling 19th-century writer Fanny Fern? NPR lists five women writers who were popular in 19th-century America, but are rarely known today.
“Power cannot satirize: It has too much to lose. When it comes to satire, power is mute.” At the New York Times, writers Siddhartha Deb and James Parker discuss whether legitimate satire must strike upward at the powerful.
Here’s one way to get people to read a long, boring user agreement: Turn it into a graphic novel. Cartoonist R. Sikoryak has created a graphic novel using the text from iTunes’ Terms and Conditions, which features protagonist Steve Jobs as both hero and villain. (The Verge)
The new issue of Humanities features a profile of Brave New World author Aldous Huxley.
At the Rumpus, Bill Clegg talks about his life as a literary agent and a writer, and his debut novel, Did You Ever Have a Family.
In the latest installment of the Atlantic’s By Heart series, fiction writer Mary Gaitskill discusses the influence of a passage in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, in which the characters’ hidden selves are revealed. “Through a book like Anna Karenina, we can be enticed to go beyond the uninteresting, day-to-day appearance—and find the parts of a person that are there, unseen, beneath the surface.”
