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:
“Noir in particular is a great tool for discussing social justice issues or anything really deeply atmospheric. Anything in the groundwater comes out in noir because, when you have murders, you have extremes of human behavior.” At the Los Angeles Review of books, Désirée Zamorano interviews novelist Steph Cha, the “sole Korean American feminist writing noir today.”
Since its origin in 1999, the publishing house New York Review Books (NYRB) continues to fill a niche by reissuing forgotten works by important authors, including Drum-Taps by Walt Whitman—released in April—and a collection of early satirical stories by the young Anton Chekov, which was just released last week. Of the press’s mission, NYRB editorial director Edwin Frank says, “From the beginning, it was our intention to be resolutely eclectic, and build our classics series as different voices build a fugue.” (New York Times)
“Every story I have ever told has a kind of breach to it, I think. You could say that my writing isn’t quite right. That all the beginnings have endings in them.” Author Lidia Yuknavitch has an essay up at Guernica on violence, beauty, and the value of thinking in stories.
Tonight, the city of Hull, England, will mark the thirtieth anniversary of poet Philip Larkin’s death by hosting live music events at various sites around the city’s Larkin Trail, a path which gives visitors “a feel for what life was like for Larkin in Hull and also the kind of things that influenced his writing.” The poet lived in Hull from 1955 until his death in 1985. (Independent)
Over at the New York Review of Books blog, Ian Buruma reviews Yukio Ninagawa’s theatrical adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s 2002 novel Kafka on the Shore. Buruma describes the production as a surrealist “collage of modern, neon-lit, commercialized, glitzy Japan, haunted by dark, mostly unspoken memories of World War II.”
Meanwhile, the diaries that Pippi Longstocking author Astrid Lindgren wrote between 1939 and 1945 have been acquired by Pushkin Press in the U.K. and Yale University Press in the U.S. and Canada. The diaries depict Lindgren’s life in neutral Sweden during World War II. Already published in Sweden, War Diaries will be released in the U.S and the U.K. for the first time in 2016. (Bookseller)
This week in the U.K., the Amazon Kindle reader turns five. To mark the anniversary and the growth of digital self-publishing on the platform, the Telegraph highlights several best-selling, self-published Kindle authors, some of whom gave up high-profile jobs to become “Kindlepreneurs.”
