Remembering Barney Rosset, AWP Field Guide, and More

by
Evan Smith Rakoff
2.22.12

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:

Legendary Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset has passed away at the age of eighty-nine. He championed Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, introduced American readers to the work of Jean Genet and Pablo Neruda, and tirelessly fought repressive obscenity laws. (Notebook)

If you'd like to read more about the life and work of Barney Rosset, the New York Times profiled the influential publisher in 2009, and the Paris Review interviewed Mr. Rosset in 1997.

The Weekly Standard asks will there ever be another Great American Novel?

On his website, novelist Chuck Wendig offers twenty-five tips for aspiring writers. Number fifteen: "Commerce is not the enemy of art." (Terrible Minds)

After Paul Dano was cast in Being Flynn, the screen adaptation of Nick Flynn’s memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, he recalls, “I went to my local bookstore to buy it, and the people at the bookstore said, ‘Oh, no, we have a different copy for you.’ They brought me out a copy—with a note written in it to me from Nick. I was spooked; how did he know what bookstore I’d visit to buy the book? Turns out he lives in my neighborhood.” (Daily Actor)

Citing examples in the work of Jonathan Lethem, Don DeLillo, and Geoff Dyer, the Millions looks at what happens when a writer becomes obsessed with a movie.

If you're going to the upcoming AWP conference in Chicago, Tin House offers a tongue-in-cheek field guide: "Poets can be divided into two types: those over fifty years of age, and those under thirty-two. There are no poets in between thirty-two and fifty because they have gone out and gotten jobs."

The Christian Science Monitor profiles Martha White, grandchild and literary executor of author E. B. White.