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 former home of Walt Whitman in Camden, Pennsylvania, has secured $895,730 in funding for restorations of the building and three adjoining houses, which were built in the mid-nineteenth century. (Philadelphia Enquirer)
Killing Commendatore, the latest novel by best-selling author Haruki Murakami, has been classified as “indecent” by a censorship tribunal in Hong Kong, meaning it cannot be sold to minors and must be placed in a wrapper that bears a legal warning. Almost two thousand people have signed a petition calling for the reversal of the tribunal’s decision. (Guardian)
The ten finalists for the Poetry Foundation’s 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships have been announced. The annual awards of $25,800 each are given to U.S. poets between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one. The five winners will be announced on September 4.
A former Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh archivist and an antiquarian bookseller have been charged with “one of the largest library thefts in history.” The two men stole more than eight million dollars worth of materials from the institution over a twenty-year period. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
Forbes has deleted an op-ed article it recently published suggesting that Amazon should replace all local libraries, following backlash from U.S. libraries and their advocates. (QZ)
Fiction writer Laura Van Den Berg discusses what she wanted to know more about while writing her new novel, The Third Hotel: “Ghosts. Death. Accidents. Violence. Sick parents. Marriage. Florida. Tourism. Planes. Hotels. Cameras. Horror films. Misogyny. Secrets.” (Paris Review)
Fiction writer Amitava Kumar, whose second novel, Immigrant, Montana, is out next week from Knopf, shares five books about finding love. (Book Marks)
