A Room of One’s Own Bookstore for Sale, Funny Books, and More

by
Staff
6.6.16

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 New York Times announced that its ArtsBeat culture blog is closing after nine years. A gradual shift in how the publication reports its digital arts coverage prompted the decision to absorb the ArtsBeat content into the New York Times online arts section.

Meanwhile, in operation since 1975, A Room of One’s Own bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin, is up for sale. Rather than selling to the highest bidder, cofounder Sandi Torkildson and her business partner Nancy Geary want to ensure the new owner carries on the store’s tradition and is fully vested in its future success. A Room of One’s Own is one of Madison’s longest operating businesses, and is “part of the country’s first wave of feminist bookstores to open in the 1970s.” (Madison.com)

In the latest installment of Electric Literature’s Writing Life Around the World series, Mexican author and journalist Juan Villoro writes about the literary community in Mexico City, particularly in reference to its cafés as areas of intellectual and literary incubation.

At the A.V. Club, journalist, self-proclaimed “science goober,” and humor writer Mary Roach, whose work is marked by a comedic approach to exploring unconventional topics, lists five books in various genres that use humor in similar ways.  

The rise of digital self-publishing platforms has led to an increase in plagiarism. Writers who publish their work on platforms such as Amazon and Kobo are seeing their work copied, sometimes word for word, and it is often difficult to track down the perpetrators. (Atlantic)

“I think I am always moved by experiences where/when the temporal is manifest in the spatial, when history is apparent in geography. Less grandly, there are always incidental pleasures, wherever you are. And I like the human drama—romance often—that takes place in the midst of places charged with some special significance. The place in such circumstances is always more than a backdrop: it has a kind of agency.” Travel writer Geoff Dyer discusses “awe fatigue,” and his new book of essays, White Sands, out now from Pantheon. (Literary Hub)

Over at NPR, fiction writer Emma Straub chats about her latest book, Modern Lovers (Penguin), which depicts a different side of New York City: “You could be anywhere right now, and that’s where I wanted my characters to be. I wanted them to exist in a New York City that a lot of people don’t know exists, the quiet one.”

Writing as a full-time job sounds like a dream, but most writers require a day job in order to pursue their passions. Entropy’s contributing writers list their day jobs, which range from patent attorney to fire lookout.