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:
Harvard University has discovered that three library books in its collection, including a medieval legal text, a Roman poetry collection, and a work of French philosophy, were bound in human skin. (GalleyCat)
A collection of spicy letters written in German by Ian Fleming, the British author and creator of James Bond, to his Austrian lover Edith Morpurgo will be auctioned next week as part of the New York Antiquarian Book Fair. (Daily Mail)
Washington D.C.’s Split This Rock festival begins today; the Harvard Crimson questions the goals at the heart of the four-day festival that celebrates poetry and activism.
Chris Davis, the chief operating officer of Open Road Media, provides a suggested reading list for gay men coinciding with the digital publisher’s release of thirteen books by author Paul Monette this month and in April. (Huffington Post)
Publisher’s Weekly examines three modifications in writing and marketing that helped Christina Baker Kline’s latest novel, Orphan Train, outsell her four previous works of fiction.
Meg Wolitzer, whose book The Interestings is released in paperback this week, talks about writing the first eighty pages of a novel—and discusses the five thousand dollars she got for her first book, Sleepwalking—at the Daily Beast.
Author Ayşe Papatya Bucak talks with the Kenyon Review about mythological characters, how her writing process has changed over the past five years, and why she writes.
Novelists Zoë Heller and Mohsin Hamid consider whether or not to write what they know. (New York Times)
