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:
“I have always wanted to hear the stories of lost wonders, of how noon was turned dark as night by vast flocks of the now-extinct passenger pigeon, of Ebbets Field and five-cent all-day Saturday matinées and Horn & Hardart automats, and I have always been drawn to those rare surviving things… that speak, mutely or eloquently, of a time and a place and a generation that will soon be gone from the face of the earth.” Novelist Michael Chabon defines nostalgia in his remarks to the Jewish Book Council, upon receiving the organization’s Modern Literary Achievement Award earlier this month. (New Yorker)
The British television movie To Walk Invisible: The Brontë Sisters aired last night on PBS and is available for viewing online at the PBS website. The movie tells the story of how the three Brontë sisters wrote and published their novels in the nineteenth century. (Atlantic)
Last week the accounting firm KPMG gave away more than ten thousand brand-new books to public-school teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since 2008, KPMG has given away more than three million books. (SF Gate)
Patti Smith has purchased poet Arthur Rimbaud’s childhood home in Roche, a village in France near the Belgian border. (Architectural Digest)
The semifinals of the Tournament of Books, sponsored by the Morning News, have begun. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad will duke it out with Dexter Palmer’s Version Control today, and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing will go head to head with Nathan Hill’s The Nix tomorrow. The winner will be selected on March 31.
George Gene Gustines considers the movement to reflect the real world in comics with more diverse protagonists and writers, including a new Marvel comic series that features a gay Latina superhero, America Chavez, written by Gabby Rivera, a writer who is also gay and Latina. (New York Times)
Poet Safiya Sinclair talks with the Rumpus about making sense of violence, patriarchy in Jamaica, and the influence of Shakespeare’s The Tempest on her debut book, Cannibal.Austrian playwright and Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek has written a play about Trump, On the Royal Road: The Burgher King, which will premiere in Germany in the fall. Partial excerpts of the play are being read tonight in New York City at the CUNY Graduate Center. (New York Times)
