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:

Designer and artist Es Devlin has installed a red lion [2] next to the bronze lions in London’s Trafalgar Square that creates poetry via a Google algorithm. Passers-by are invited to “feed” the lion words; the lion then incorporates the words into a two-line verse that appears on a screen in its open mouth. (BBC News)

With the help of a group of book critics, Vulture has put together “a premature attempt at the twenty-first century literary canon [3],” featuring the hundred most important books of the 2000s so far.

Daniel Alarcón on writing across genres, scrapping a project and starting over, and learning to give up control as an artist [4]. (Creative Independent)

“At nearly 1,200 earnest pages, Book Six is a life-drainer, so dense and so dull that time and light seem to bend around it.” Dwight Garner reviews Karl Ove Knausgaard’s sixth and final installment of his My Struggle series [5]. (New York Times)

David Sedaris on taking walks [6] in places all over the world from Dubai to Sardinia to Wisconsin. (Guardian)

Listen to Sedaris read from his recently published diaries in episode 16 of Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast [7].

Emma Ramadan on messy first drafts [8], finding the right book to translate, and her translation from the French of Anne Garréta’s novel Sphinx. (BOMB)

Yesterday Apple released its revamped iBooks app, now called Apple Books [9]. (TechCrunch)

The three novels in Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians series have taken the top three spots on the New York Times paperback fiction best-seller list [10]. (Publishers Weekly)