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:
Edited by National Book Award–winning novelist Jesmyn Ward, a new anthology called The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race features work from contemporary African American writers—including Claudia Rankine, Jericho Brown, Nathasha Trethewey, and Edwidge Danticat—that explores the black experience in America today. (Root)
“I have a deep desire to honor the folks who came before me even though I couldn’t literally speak to my dad’s parents. I try to speak to them in the poems that I write.” Oakland, California–based poet Jade Cho speaks about her debut collection, In The Tongue of Ghosts, which examines and critiques internalized racism and her experience as a third-generation Asian American woman. (NBC News)
Meanwhile, fiction writer Jade Sharma talks about her path to writing, as well as the themes of addiction and disillusion she explores in her debut novel, Problems. Sharma’s novel is the first print title published by Emily Books; read a Q&A with the press’s founders, Ruth Curry and Emily Gould, in the July/August 2016 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. (Los Angeles Times)
A petition to restore writer Dennis Cooper’s blog after Google deleted it without explanation, erasing more than a decade of literary writing and conversations, has reached over three thousand signatures since last week. “Google, give it back,” the petition states. “We want all of it, the thousands of posts about art and literature, about roller coasters and defunct amusement parks, about haunted houses, optical illusions, and indie rock.” (Change.org)
Writer Osman Durrani examines two new books that explore the multi-dimensional legacy of poet, novelist, dramatist, and essayist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. (Times Literary Supplement)
The Guardian features a set of interviews with the translators of fiction writers Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elena Ferrante, Gabriel García Márquez, and Han Kang.
If you need a laugh this Monday morning (and don’t we all?), read this parody of the e-mail exchange featured in last week’s T Magazine between actress Natalie Portman and novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. In the parody, Portman swaps e-mails with novelist Cormac McCarthy. (Millions)
