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:
Merriam-Webster has released a new online feature, Time Traveler, which shows the year words were first used—“face-palm” first appeared in 1996, “heartthrob” in 1796, and “dog days” in 1538. (Los Angeles Times)
Karl Ove Knausgaard talks with the New York Times about his dream literary dinner party (Homer, James Joyce, and Anne Carson), crying at the end of biographies, and how everyone should read Proust.
The Milton Cottage Trust has made an appeal to the public to help it preserve the cottage in Buckhinghamshire where John Milton finished writing Paradise Lost three hundred fifty years ago. (Guardian)
“The history of the novel, paradoxically, has been a history of the erosion of the presumed powers and abilities of novelists…” At Harper’s, Jonathan Dee asks if the social novel has a future.
To commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the Partition of India—when British colonial rule ended and India and Pakistan became independent nations—the BBC has released an audio dramatization of Salman Rushdie’s classic novel Midnight’s Children. (Open Culture)
In other Rushdie news, Porochista Khakpour interviewed the acclaimed author in the latest issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, which was released yesterday.
“This, in the end, might be the greatest social good of poetry: to get us to live differently, with a different sort of thinking and concentration, even if it’s just for a few moments.” Matthew Zapruder talks with Ada Limón about the importance of poetry and resisting the idea of language as purely functional. (Guernica)
“His imagination had a dark side, and he used that dark twin and its nightmares in his work; but to the waking world, he presented a combination of eager, wonder-filled boy and kindly uncle, and that was just as real.” The Paris Review has published Margaret Atwood’s new eulogy for Ray Bradbury, who died five years ago.
The New York Times T Magazine considers the impact of the celebrity Instagram book endorsement, with public figures such as Emma Watson, Reese Witherspoon, and Lena Dunham posting about their favorite books.
Read more about Lena Dunham’s love of books and her new book imprint with Random House, Lenny Books, in Poets & Writers Magazine’s latest Q&A.
