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.
PEN has announced the lineup for this year’s World Voices Festival, which will bring together writers and artists representing over fifty nationalities for a week-long program of literary events in New York City starting May 6. Participating writers include novelist Jennifer Egan and poet Raúl Zurita; Arundhati Roy will deliver the keynote lecture.
British author Andrea Levy has died of cancer at age sixty-two. Levy achieved commercial and critical success as a chronicler of the Windrush generation; her fourth novel, Small Island, won the Whitbread Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. (Guardian)
“The amount of eavesdropping was enormous. Other people’s diaries streamed around her. Should she be listening to the conversations of teenagers?” Patricia Lockwood shares her “diary of the Internet,” which she wrote in the third person because, she explains, “I no longer felt like myself.” (London Review of Books)
A new charge of plagiarism has been added to accusations levelled at The Woman in the Window author Dan Mallory, the subject of a recent New Yorker profile, “A Suspense Novelist’s Trail of Deceptions.” Now, the New York Times points out that Mallory’s thriller is strikingly similar to Sarah A. Denzil’s novel Saving April, which was published several months before Mallory sold his book to William Morrow.
“It was a riot trying to ‘gracefully fall’ in our complex outfits without causing scandal.” Every January costumed revelers gather at the Masonic Temple in Pasadena for the Jane Austen Evening. (New York Times)
The Washington Post’s Ron Charles considers twenty-three of the most unforgettable last lines in fiction: “Novels that conclude with such gracefully calibrated language that we close the back cover and feel physically imprinted, as though the words were pressed into us by a weight we can hardly fathom.”
Anna Lindstedt, the Swedish ambassador to China, is under investigation for her role in an unusual meeting between two businessmen and Anna Gui, the daughter of imprisoned publisher Gui Minhai. (Washington Post)
Barnes & Noble presents its most anticipated books of the season, including James Patterson’s thriller The Chef and Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys.
“When we say something is a burden, there’s always a negative feeling about that, it’s something we don’t want to carry or live with, but who wants to stop thinking about the ones they have loved and have lost?” Yiyun Li talks about trying to find the words to grieve and her new novel, Where Reasons End. (Literary Hub)
