Susan Hill on Horror Fiction, Anne Carson’s New Collection, and More

by
Staff
10.24.16

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:

Bob Dylan’s Nobel saga continues. A member of the Swedish Academy has called Dylan’s silence over his Nobel Prize win “impolite and arrogant.” (New York Times)

Award-winning poet Lucia Perillo has died at age fifty-eight. A recipient of a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, Perillo authored several collections of poetry, including Inseminating the Elephant, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Read an interview with Perillo from the March/April 2009 issue of Poets & Writers. (Associated Press)

NPR features an interview with classicist and poet Anne Carson about her new collection, Float, which is out tomorrow from Knopf. “With every sentence, there is that attempt to make something new happen inside, moving from this word to that word.”

Meanwhile, at DiveDapper, poet Cynthia Cruz discusses her process and her latest collection, How the End Begins. “The overwhelm and the chaos that is manifested in those poems is deliberate to show how somebody who is dealing with trauma deals with their mind.”

“Dysfunction makes for really good fiction.” Authors John Irving and Nathan Hill discuss Hill’s acclaimed debut novel, The Nix. (Hazlitt)

The Woman in Black author Susan Hill—dubbed the “grande dame of English supernatural fiction”—shares a list of five books that taught her about the complexity of horror fiction. (Penguin)

From horror fiction to macabre fact, Megan Rosenbloom looks at the strange history of books bound in human skin and its ties to the history of medicine. (Lapham’s Quarterly)

If that didn’t kill your appetite, see what famous authors will be handing out to Trick-or-Treaters this year in a comic from Sara Lautman. (Electric Literature)