Flashbacks in Literature, Emily Skaja Wins Walt Whitman Award, and More

by
Staff
3.30.18

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:

Emily Skaja has won the 2018 Walt Whitman Award, the nation’s most valuable first-book prize for a poet, for her debut collection, Brute. She will receive $5,000, publication by Graywolf Press, and a residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy. (Academy of American Poets)

Writer Anita Shreve died yesterday at age seventy-one. Shreve was the author of several best-selling novels, including The Pilot’s Wife and The Stars Are Fire. (Portland Press Herald)

Do flashbacks work in literature or are they infuriating? Tim Parks considers examples from Jonathan Franzen’s Purity to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Peter Stamm’s On a Day Like This. (New York Review of Books)

“The novel’s timeliness cannot be overstated, but it also invites a bigger question: What do we as readers, as a society, want from our fiction?” Lena Dunham reviews Meg Wolitzer’s new novel, The Female Persuasion, and its depiction of modern feminism. (New York Times)

Today is the championship match of the Tournament of Books: Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream will face off against George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo. March Shredness will also conclude today, with Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me” and Loudness’s “Crazy Nights,” repped by writers Elena Passarello and W. Todd Kaneko, respectively, going head to head for the title.

E-book distributor OverDrive announced that it has reached a milestone: a billion e-book checkouts. The distributor, which opened in 2013, works primarily with libraries. (Forbes)

Karen Russell revisits Joy Williams’s The Changeling, a novel published forty years ago that is “refreshingly, transgressively uninterested in reflecting the familiar dramas of human life.” (New Yorker)

Manometer, dabblings, and laxatives—a computer programmer has made a script that determines all the nine-letter words that can be made by stringing together airport codes. (Atlas Obscura)-