Jonah Lehrer Resigns, Literary Feuds, and More

by
Evan Smith Rakoff
7.31.12

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:

Author Jonah Lehrer resigned yesterday from the New Yorker after admitting he fabricated quotations in his best-selling book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. (New York Times)

The Baffler looks at the case of former English student Adam Wheeler, who is serving a year in prison after successfully defrauding Harvard University by falsifying admission and scholarship applications. "Wheeler’s crime, in the institution’s eyes, was that he saw Harvard degrees for what they are—items for purchase that cloak the owner with a manufactured prestige that, in our pretend meritocracy, automatically raises one’s market value upon the deal’s closing."

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal details the benefits of self-deception.

Ewan Morrison is "convinced that e-publishing is another tech bubble, and that it will burst within the next eighteen months." (Guardian)

Author Marie Myung-Ok Lee describes what raising a child with disabilities can teach about personal happiness. (Atlantic)

Poet Leigh Stein explains how to read in public: "Your audience wants to be entertained. They are hungry for stories. Don’t read something that only works 'on the page.' We can’t see the page."

Anna Altman describes the unsettling discovery that there are two published versions of Sheila Heti’s recent novel, How Should a Person Be? (Paris Review Daily)

Humanities magazine looks at the life and work of James Agee, who is most famous for his books Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and A Death in the Family, but also wrote journalism, scripts, and film criticism, which were collected in James Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism, as part of Library of America's two-volume set of Agee's writing.

Melville House created a slideshow of its favorite literary feuds, including Hemingway, Truman Capote, Lillian Hellman, and many others.