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.
“He’d be driving the car and he’d pull over to write something and laugh to himself—sometimes he’d read it to me, sometimes he wouldn’t—and next to every chair he had a notebook.” At the Guardian, Matt Salinger confirms that his father, J. D. Salinger, was teeming with ideas, and that the unpublished writing of the Catcher in the Rye author’s last fifty years will eventually be made available to his fans.
The New York Times presents more than one hundred writing prompts from its Student Opinion pages, from feeling lonely to living forever.
For more writing prompts in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, check out The Time Is Now. (Poets & Writers)
Boston-based poetry press Black Ocean has assumed all publishing activities for Seattle’s Gramma Poetry. The agreement between the two independent presses will see Gramma’s nine poetry collections published as Black Ocean titles in future printings. (Publishers Weekly)
At NPR, Esmé Weijun Wang talks about The Collected Schizophrenias, her new book of essays chronicling her journey towards a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder.
As part of the Eat Your Words series, Valerie Stivers cooks a meal from The Sea, the Sea, a novel by Iris Murdoch—a philosopher but not “a foodie.” “If Murdoch really ate this way—and I’m convinced she did and that Charles’s recipes were taken directly from life, since I timed it and the bean salad took me precisely four minutes and four seconds to put together—perhaps it was a way of rising above the selfish demands of the ego and achieving a more transcendent love.” (Paris Review)
Stephen King has announced a new novel. The Institute will be published by Scribner in September, less than a year after King’s last book, the novella Elevation. (Los Angeles Times)
At Colombia’s Hay Cartagena festival, author Zadie Smith challenged the importance of political correctness in writing, and the role of social media in policing personal development. “There’s no excuse for its irresponsibility, but fiction is fundamentally irresponsible.” (Guardian)
