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:
An art and design institute in Holland has created a heat-sensitive edition of Ray Bradbury’s classic dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451, whose text becomes visible only when heated. The institute is planning on producing copies of the book to sell. (Open Culture)
Poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi talks with the Los Angeles Review of Books about queer loneliness, learning to live through panic and violence, coping with jealousy over writing awards, and writing her latest collection, Rocket Fantastic.
The New York Times considers whether Amazon’s expansion into Australia will be a success, since “books and bookstores are tightly linked to Australia’s sense of itself, and to the country’s beloved ecosystem of local commerce.”
“High school had taught me about Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Baldwin. Thrift stores gave me my first tastes of Karl Marx, Saul Bellow, Albert Camus, Mary McCarthy, and Salman Rushdie.” Jason Diamond shares his obsession with Vintage Contemporaries paperbacks from the eighties. (Longreads)
Poet Ocean Vuong has made the shortlist for the Poetry Society of the United Kingdom’s annual £25,000 T. S. Eliot Prize, which was announced yesterday.
Meanwhile, at the Guardian, poet Sandeep Parmar criticizes the shortlist for its lack of diversity. “For those who have championed crucial interventions in poetry publishing, reviewing and prizes, this nearly all-white shortlist cannot help but seem inexplicably naïve and regressive.”
Jonathan Karp, the president and publisher of Simon & Schuster, shares ten rules for book editors, including “Don’t be cynical,” “Have conviction,” and “Resist the urge to acquire in slow periods.” (Publishers Weekly)
“She was also in many ways a prisoner of her desires, keeping her head down and determined to avoid the next raid.” David Yaffe considers the loneliness of poet Elizabeth Bishop. (Nation)
