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:
“It’s important to really love the idea of expanding on a moment and making the moment bigger than yourself, then you have no choice but to get out of the way. You’re writing into something you care enough about and believe in to make massive. That is where I kind of begin and end.” Hanif Abdurraqib talks about getting out of your way when writing and his forthcoming poetry collection, A Fortune for Your Disaster. (Public)
Listen to Abdurraqib read from his profile of poet Terrance Hayes in the latest issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. (Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast)
Electric Literature has launched a “stripped-down, feminist version” of the New York Times’s By the Book column, which recently featured an installment with author Andy Weir in which he recommended almost no books written by women. Electric Literature’s column, Read More Women, will feature authors of both genders recommending books by women.
Students at the University of Manchester have painted over a mural of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” to protest Kipling’s support of colonialism and racist attitudes. The students painted Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise” over Kipling’s poem. (New York Times)Min Jin Lee considers the fiction of South Korean writer Han Kang, whose work wrestles with violence, self-determination, and the “shamanism, Confucianism, Buddhism, secular humanism, and Christianity that informs the modern Korean consciousness.” (New York Review of Books)
Bustle recommends nine recently published poetry collections to read during your lunch break, including Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Oceanic, Carmen Giménez Smith’s Cruel Futures, and Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Not Here.
“The entire time I was in those bookstores, I wished to be seen as a bookseller first, an author second.” Lillian Li describes going on tour for her debut novel, Number One Chinese Restaurant, after years of working as a bookseller.
Read more about Li’s writing habits and process in a recent installment of Ten Questions.
“She believes herself to be ‘exceptional,’ and expects her life to be ‘amazing.’ She doesn’t like being compared to other people.” The Cut profiles Ottessa Moshfegh.
“But the deepest fear may be the most existential: how little we ultimately understand other human beings, even our own children.” Ruth Franklin meditates on novels about evil children. (New York Times)
