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 celebrate Women’s History Month, Loganberry Books in Cleveland has shelved all its books by male authors with the spines facing inward. It took the store’s all-female staff more than two hours to turn all ten thousand books around. (Cleveland Scene)
Meanwhile, the New York Times rounds up ten books by women in power, including Angela Davis, Katharine Graham, and Hillary Clinton.
The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has announced the finalists for its $15,000 annual prize, given for a book of fiction. The finalists are Viet Dinh, Louise Erdrich, Garth Greenwell, Imbolo Mbue, and Sunil Yapa; all the finalists except Erdrich are debut novelists. (Washington Post)
In other award news, the National Book Foundation has announced the judges for its 2017 prizes. (Los Angeles Times)
Michiko Kakutani reviews Joan Didion’s South & West and considers how Didion’s observations prefigured the current political divide. The book, which combines excerpts of two notebooks Didion kept in the seventies about the American South and California, comes out today. (New York Times)
“You revise your reader up, in your imagination, with every pass. You keep saying to yourself: ‘No, she’s smarter than that. Don’t dishonor her with that lazy prose or that easy notion.’” Fiction writer George Saunders discusses imagining his reader as part of his revision process. (Guardian)
Nick Ripatrazone makes a case for bringing back the big book-jacket photo. “Bring back those full-page portraits that pronounced I wrote a book, damn it.” (Millions)
In honor of its ninety-second anniversary, the New Yorker has launched a poetry bot that will send a random excerpt of poetry to users every day for ninety-two days via Facebook Messenger or Twitter.
