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:
“So the thing is, how do you understand the bizarreness of this place that I live in, all these languages, all this? It’s only through delightful listening. When people talk about free speech, some of us often say, ‘Free speech and fearless listening.’” Arundhati Roy talks with Viet Thanh Nguyen about living in India, the exhilaration of political engagement, and the role of the writer. (Los Angeles Review of Books)
Archeologists have determined that a recently discovered building in the middle of Cologne, Germany, was a library built nearly two thousand years ago that housed up to twenty thousand scrolls. (Guardian)
The New York Times talks with “BookTubers,” the young people who create popular YouTube videos about books and host channels with thousands of followers.
Abrams has bought the Overlook Press, which specializes in out-of-print fiction and nonfiction titles. Publisher and editor Peter Mayer, who cofounded the press with his father in 1971, died in May. (Shelf Awareness)
“You come in, and it’s Narnia.” Four millennials who work at Capitol Hill, a used bookstore in Washington, D.C., have purchased the store from its beloved and gruff owner. (Washington Post)
“It’s angry. Hurt. Very hurt. It’s way more raw. It’s very focused on exterior influences to the personal, to the psychological, to the body. It’s more focused on the exterior than my other books have been.” Poet Morgan Parker talks about her forthcoming collection, Magical Negro. (Shondaland)
The Atlantic considers a new study that argues doctors should read short fiction to help them “to wrestle with the mess, to pay attention to narrative perspective and detail, and to become more comfortable with ambiguity.”
The Washington Post reviews recent poetry collections by Nicole Cooley, Anne Waldman, and Elizabeth Spires, as well as Graywolf Press’s new anthology of indigenous poetry.
