Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories.
Elena Ferrante, author of the best-selling Neapolitan series that began with My Brilliant Friend, will publish her first novel in four years this November. The title of the new book has yet to be revealed, but Ferrante’s English-language publisher, Europa Editions, did accompany the announcement with a teaser excerpt indicating that the novel will be set in Naples. (Guardian)
The National Book Foundation has named Oren J. Teicher the recipient of the 2019 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. As the associate executive director of the American Booksellers Association and then its CEO, Teicher led efforts to strengthen and expand independent bookstores nationwide. The award will be presented to Teicher, who retires at the end of this year, at the National Book Awards ceremony in New York City on November 20.
Veteran editor and publisher Susan Kamil has died at age sixty-nine. Kamil worked in publishing for more than forty years, many of which were spent at Random House, where she served as executive vice president and publisher from 2010. (Publishers Weekly)
Novelist Jonathan Franzen has drawn online ire for his New Yorker essay in which he declares the climate apocalypse is inevitable. Climate scientists have taken issue with Franzen’s description of running “various future scenarios through my brain” as a less-than-rigorous approach to assessing the outlook of the planet. (Guardian)
In the 1980s, a convicted murderer tried his hand at poetry and found a publisher in biker magazines. But to today’s police, his verses sound like the facts of an actual crime. Could a poem called “DANGEROUS DAVE” be the key to solving a decades-old cold case? (Washington Post)
At the Paris Review Daily, Alice McDermott shares some of her favorite “very short” novels—including works by Saul Bellow, Julie Otsuka, and Edith Wharton—organized into three categories: “A Day in the Life,” “An Inciting Incident,” and “A Life.”
Seth Perlow investigates the complicated history of permissions and rights to Emily Dickinson’s poetry, letters, and manuscripts, with a particular focus on one of the primary custodians of the poet’s work: Harvard University. “Harvard has loosened its control over Dickinson in some ways, but it should also abandon the intimidating language that discourages freer uses of her work.” (Los Angeles Review of Books)
“All of my fiction is full of invention—invented characters, invented situations—but I feel an urgency I don't fully understand about being true to place.” Garth Greenwell talks to the New Yorker about place, transitional spaces, and intimacy in his story “Harbor,” which will appear in both the upcoming issue of the magazine and Greenwell’s forthcoming novel, Cleanness.
