Sherman Alexie’s Sparks Twitter Deluge, Charlotte Brontë’s French Homework, and More

by
Evan Smith Rakoff
6.12.13

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:

Disclosures of government sponsored phone and Internet surveillance has increased sales of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. (Wall Street Journal)

One page of Charlotte Brontë's French homework (on the topic of filial love) fetched almost eighty thousand dollars in a private sale. The work was discovered last year in a personal library. (Guardian)

Novelist and poet Sherman Alexie sparked a Twitter deluge with this short statement: “Grammar cops are rarely good writers. Imagination always disobeys.” (GalleyCat)

Narrative 4, a storytelling nonprofit, launched recently in partnership with Esquire. To celebrate, Byliner has new fiction from Narrative 4 contributors Adam Haslett, Amy Bloom, Patrick McGrath, and Ayana Mathis.

In a photo essay, Charlie Savage looks at the libraries of Guantanamo Bay detention camp. (New York Times)

For the Paris Review Daily, Sadie Stein reads Lydia Davis’s “Local Obits.

Fashion boutique Aritzia asked Slaughterhouse 90210 creator Maris Kreizman to pair famed locations in New York City with passages from favorite literature.

If you’re sending a kid off to their last day of school this week, author Dani Shapiro shares her thoughts about transitional moments and the writing life.