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:
The longlist for the 2018 Man Booker Prize has been announced. The annual £50,000 award is given for the best work of fiction published in the previous year in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The list includes writers Rachel Kushner, Richard Powers, Michael Ondaatje, and Nick Drnaso.
Drnaso is the first writer to be nominated for a graphic novel. “If Mr. Drnaso wins, it would be the biggest moment for the graphic format since Art Spiegelman’s Maus won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992,” argues Alex Marshall. (New York Times)
Read more about Drnaso’s graphic novel Sabrina in a recent installment of the Written Image.
To promote the prize and the value of reading at home, the Man Booker Prize is partnering with IKEA next week to install a reading room in the furniture retailer’s north London store. The rooms will be stocked with free copies of the longlisted titles.
Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal talk about incorporating poetry and dialogue in verse into the movie Blindspotting, which is “half social drama, half choreopoem.” (Atlantic)
“All literature, great or small, is in that sense contemporary: it crowds around us as we write; it’s the air we breathe.” Elena Ferrante on why she no longer believes in literary novelty. (Guardian)
Who is the real Lorax? Researchers have found that Dr. Seuss based his 1971 book The Lorax on the patas monkeys that live in West and East Africa. (Washington Post)
“Loathe these women and their choices, but it’s hard not to love watching them rebel.” Maris Kreizman on the “boldly self-destructive antiheroines” in Melissa Broder’s The Pisces and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. (BuzzFeed Reader)
A graduate student has found an 1811 bill of sale from a London bookseller for a copy of Sense and Sensibility, which shows that the Prince Regent—whom Jane Austen hated—might have been one of the first people to buy one of Austen’s novels. (New York Times)
