Barnes & Noble Creates NOOK Press, Storytelling Clichés to Avoid, and More

by
Evan Smith Rakoff
4.9.13

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:

Barnes & Noble has created a service for self-published authors—NOOK Press. (GalleyCat)

The New York Daily News has choice words for actor and Yale PhD student James Franco's literary criticism: “Franco doesn’t do much more than summarize the plots of novels with little more critical scrutiny than you’d see in a middle-school book report.”

Jon Tribble visits the life and work of poet Jake Adam York, who died unexpectedly last year at age forty. (Los Angeles Review of Books)

You create elaborate disaster fantasies that you project onto your life.” On his blog, author Alexander Chee lists the signs that may indicate you're a fiction writer.

From “countdown clocks” to a “chosen one,” Lit Reactor lists ten storytelling clichés to avoid.

“I despaired. It was time to despair. I was on version thirty-three.” Terese Svoboda details the path to her first novel. (Quivering Pen)

Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee, Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett—for the Los Angeles Times, critic Carolyn Kellogg discusses a seeming trend of books “pairing cultural masters.”

Meanwhile, Robert Pinsky examines the poems and literary friendship of Robert Bridges and Gerard Manley Hopkins.