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.
After five months without a lead editor, the New York Review of Books has named Emily Greenhouse and Gabriel Winslow-Yost the new coeditors of the magazine. Longtime contributor Daniel Mendelsohn will assume the newly created role of editor at large. (New York Times)
Comics publisher Devil’s Due has announced a new series: “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Freshman Force. New Party: Who Dis?” The comic, which will feature the “Washington warrior” taking on the Trump administration, is scheduled for release on May 15. (Washington Post)
A new film adaptation of Richard Wright’s novel Native Son, directed by Rashid Johnson and written by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, will debut on HBO on April 6. (Los Angeles Times)
After The Emissary won the National Book Foundation’s new National Book Award for Translated Literature last year, independent publisher New Directions noticed a considerable spike in the book’s sales. Written by Yoko Tawada and translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani, the novel was selling an average seventy copies per week before the award; after Tawada’s win that number jumped to more than three hundred and twenty-five. (Publishers Weekly)
“As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism!” Mark Twain, at least, seems to have anticipated the murky nature of the “secondhand books” that have been making literary headlines. (Guardian)
At the New Yorker, Jonathan Lethem talks about his story “The Starlet Apartments,” published in this week’s issue of the magazine. “The story also reproduces a character pattern I’ve traced before, that of a malleable or incomplete man enthralled and enmeshed by a charismatic monster.”
“My basic philosophy is that if I am scrupulously working to be as truthful as possible, and the truth that I’m trying to reveal is important for the world to know, it’s fine for me to write about it.” Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman on writing her debut memoir, Sounds Like Titanic. (Rumpus)
The Japan News pays tribute to scholar Donald Keene, who died on Sunday. Keene, who obtained Japanese citizenship in 2011 at age eighty-nine, was one of the first researchers of Japanese literature in the United States following World War II.
