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 Dallas school district that banned seven books from its classrooms last week has reportedly reversed its decision. Dawson Orr, the superintendent of the Highland Park district, suspended the books—which included Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle, Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon—after parents challenged complained of sex scenes and references to rape, abuse, and abortion in the books. After the suspension, more than two thousand parents, students, and alumni signed an online petition to get the books reinstated in the curriculum. The original decision was made just as Banned Books Week was getting underway; Orr reversed his decision and offered an apology to the community on Sunday. (Dallas Morning News)
Today is National Poetry Day in the United Kingdom. To celebrate, the Telegraph challenges poetry lovers to test their knowledge of some of the U.K.’s best-loved poems.
Author and screenwriter Anthony Horowitz is writing a new James Bond novel based on a previously unpublished short story by Ian Fleming, fifty years after the original Bond author’s death. (Guardian)
“We hoped for writers who could put across ideas that are not widely expressed, including skeptical criticism of the language of convention.” A perceived crisis in the quality of literary criticism is what led Robert Silvers to launch the New York Review of Books in 1963, and it’s a crisis he believes continues today. Silver, who cofounded the independent magazine with Barbara Epstein, talks to the Atlantic about starting the NYRB, and about The 50 Year Argument, a new documentary directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi that chronicles the magazine’s history and influence.
Skyhorse Publishing has acquired the assets of bankrupt publisher Good Books, and has sold the press’s Mayo Clinic line to Perseus Books Group. Skyhorse paid about $1.57 million in the deal, a total that included just over $1 million for the Good Books inventory and about $550,000 to pay off the defunct press’s debt. (Publishers Weekly)
Bloomsbury UK will publish Neil Gaiman’s short story The Sleeper and the Spindle as a book later this month. The story, which was inspired by the “Sleeping Beauty” fairy tale, was originally included in the 2013 anthology Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales. (GalleyCat)
In this week’s installment of the New York Times Bookends series, authors Anna Holmes and Rivka Galchen discuss Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, which turns fifty this year, and consider whether the book offers “a tender story of unconditional love, or a disturbing tale of monstrous selfishness.”
