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:
Originally intended for publication in 1931, next week Amistad Books will publish the late Zora Neale Hurston’s previously unreleased nonfiction book Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.” The book is the result of three months of interviews that Hurston conducted with Cudjo Lewis, the last survivor of the final slave ship to land in America. Read an excerpt from the book at Vulture.
Scholars at the University of Alabama and Somerville College in Oxford, England, are digitizing Victorian scholar and economist John Stuart Mill’s collected marginalia. Mill Marginalia Online features approximately 10,000 annotations from more than a hundred books in Mill’s personal collection, including works by Francis Bacon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. (Conversation)
Academy Award–winning director Guillermo del Toro is set to adapt Alvin Schwartz’s best-selling series, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, for the big screen. (IndieWire)
In response to the #MeToo movement, major publishers are increasingly including morality clauses in their contracts, which allow publishers to “terminate agreements in response to a broad range of behavior by authors.” (Publishers Weekly)
Meanwhile, international best-selling author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks with the Guardian about #MeToo, motherhood, sexism, and the saving grace of writing fiction: “It’s exquisite, the joy. Even just talking about it I almost want to cry.”
“Many of my revisions were legislated by thinking about poetry in concert with musical curiosity. For instance, asking myself what an argument might sound like in pianissimo versus forte.” Poet Marcus Wicker discusses his second poetry collection, Silencer, at the Paris Review.
From Hong Kong to Vancouver, Atlas Obscura spotlights sixty-two of the world’s best independent bookstores.
