Pamela Paul Promoted, Fight Club and The Great Gatsby, and More

by Staff
8.18.16

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 New York Times announced yesterday that Pamela Paul, current editor of the New York Times Sunday Book Review, will now oversee the Times’s daily and Sunday book coverage. Read an interview with Paul in the May/June 2016 issue of Poets & Writers.

In translation news, a collection of Chinese poems has been translated into Kiswahili for the first time. Chinese poet Jidi Majia’s collection, Maneno Ya Moto Kutoka China, or, Words of Fire From China, is the first work of Chinese literature to have been translated “into the lingua franca of Kenya, Tanzania, and much of southeast Africa.” (Quartz)

An Argentine judge has opened an investigation into the death of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. The poet is believed to have been executed in 1936 by Franco’s fascist forces. (Guardian)

“Dahl’s most whimsical confections are always paired with torments for those who can’t resist them.” A writer considers the magical, dangerous, and grotesque power of food in Roald Dahl’s writing. (Slate)

This month marks the twentieth anniversary of Chuck Palahniuk’s best-selling novel Fight Club. In an interview with Scribd, Palahniuk explains how he originally wrote the book as a reinvention of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. (Entertainment Weekly)

At Bustle, a romance novelist discusses the complicated experience of reading her own book

How is reviewing a restaurant like reviewing a book? Book critic John Freeman and food critic Robert Sietsema discuss the intersections. (Literary Hub)