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 Daniel Handler, also known as Lemony Snicket, has developed a new initiative to unite independent bookstores. The campaign, called Upstream, involves calling upon authors to ask bookstores to sell signed copies of their books. Handler’s hope is to “remind both authors and booksellers of their local, less monolithic resources, and to improve general esprit de corps at a disheartening time.” (San Francisco Gate Chronicle)
“My book had not even been published yet and already it felt like everybody hated it, and me.” After author Kathleen Hale received a one-star review online for her first novel, she obsessively sought out her critic. (Guardian)
Human rights lawyer Brian Stevenson’s new memoir, Just Mercy, recalls his experience representing people on death row and those who have been wrongly convicted because of racial bias. Stevenson hopes his book will expose and challenge the inequalities of the U.S. Justice System and change the conversation about race in America. (NPR)
Actor Tom Hanks has published his first short story in the New Yorker. Hanks joins a list of celebrities who have contributed to the publication, and thus continues the controversy over publishing celebrity writing versus the work of aspiring writers who struggle to get published at all. (Washington Post)
Speaking of celebrity writing, Lydia Kiesling discusses author Nora Ephron’s influence on the new generation of female celebrity memoirs, and argues that this influence has turned the memoir into a “feminist self-help” book. Comedy actresses Mindy Kaling, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Lena Dunham all take cues from Ephron’s style of self-deprecating humor. (Salon)
“We’re now well into a period where literary writers are able to balance their love for horror…with their craft, and fewer and fewer bat an eye….But now that we’ve gotten past that, there’s another question raised by fiction that falls into the realm of, for lack of a more graceful term, literary horror: how does it deal with our expectations of both of its literary forebears?” Read Tobias Carroll’s craft essay on horror fiction, in which he examines contemporary horror writers’ techniques in subverting genre expectations, or embracing them while still managing to keep the stories fresh. (Electric Literature)
Browse Bob Eckstein’s new drawings of New York City’s independent (and endangered) bookstores, along with stories from booksellers and authors about the shops that they love. (New Yorker)
