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:
“To write in [cafés], to embrace the play of attention and distraction, is to travel at modernity’s pace while making very few physical movements, and to contemplate a quintessentially modern struggle over the meaning of our time, our experience.” At the Los Angeles Review of Books, writer Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft examines the cultural history of the coffeehouse, and his own personal history of writing in cafés.
New Republic editor Jeet Heer makes a case for how the influence of the academy “ruined” Saul Bellow’s fiction—namely, how Bellow’s life in academia contributed to his tendency “to pontificate in the place of narrative and to browbeat the reader with heady erudition that masks a solipsistic worldview.”
The longlist for the National Book Award in nonfiction was announced this morning. The ten finalists include Ta Nehisi-Coates’s Between the World and Me, and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith’s Ordinary Light: A Memoir.
Speaking of notable nonfiction books, at NPR, best-selling author Joyce Carol Oates discusses her new memoir, The Lost Landscape, and how her rural childhood shaped her as a writer. NPR’s Lynn Neary notes that Oates’s memoir is “a study in contrasts, moving from scenes of a happy childhood to stories tinged with tragedy or violence.”
This year marks publisher Knopf’s one-hundredth birthday. At Vanity Fair, Dave Eggers profiles Knopf’s editor in chief, Sonny Mehta, who has been with the publisher for the past twenty-eight years: “I am still convinced I have the best job in the world.”
It’s hard to make a living as a full-time writer. According to the results of a recent survey from the Authors Guild, the earnings for more than half of American authors fell below the United States poverty level last year. The study also found that overall earnings for full-time writers have dropped 30 percent since 2009. (Guardian)
French author Patrick Modiano, who won the Nobel Prize in literature last year, is finally gaining a wider readership as more of his novels are being translated into English. Since the Nobel announcement in October 2014, ten of Modiano’s novels have been published in the United States, and six more English translations are due later this year and in 2016. (Wall Street Journal)
