Women Dominate Hugo Awards, Bestselling Publishers, and More
Jorie Graham on how to live during environmental crisis; a survey of books on the power of political protest; Harriet Beecher Stowe’s disassembled house up for auction; and other news.
Genre: Fiction
Howard Jacobson on Comedy
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“Almost every great novelist has got a comedian in him, in her, somewhere or other.” Man Booker Prize–winning author Howard Jacobson speaks about the necessity of failure and comedy in literature, and what makes a novel funny.
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Imaginary Poems for the Statue of Liberty, Publishing Doubts, and More
Marlon James on writing process; Dennis Cooper’s latest film project; Matthew Zapruder on the tribe of poets; and other news.
Ancient Hidden Poems, Story-Time From Space, and More
How Rebecca Solnit became the voice of the left; the ferocious female characters in Claire Messud’s novels; Ava DuVernay to adapt Octavia Butler’s Dawn for television; and other news.
Megan Abbott on Genres
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Megan Abbott speaks about her interest in prodigies, her novel You Will Know Me (Little, Brown, 2016), and her thoughts on the superficiality of genre distinctions for Nashville Public Television’s A Word on Words.
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Liu Xia’s Poetry, the Artist’s Inner Life, and More
Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond offer advice for writers; study shows dramatic increase in profanity in American literature; the top fifty literary magazines; and other news.
Hot Tempers
Though many of us look forward to the higher temperatures and longer daylight hours of summer, studies show that particularly hot and humid days often coincide with higher incidences and expressions of anger, frustration, and irritation. Many elements may factor into this correlation, including people spending more time outside in crowds, an influx of adolescents and tourists during the summertime, increased heart rates because of the heat, and discomfort from dehydration and lack of sleep. A feeling of helplessness or lack of control over the weather may also contribute to snappish behavior. Write a short story in which your main character struggles to keep calm on one of the hottest days of the year. What is the catalyst that drives your character to lose patience or keep cool?
Middlemarch: The Series
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Middlemarch: The Series is a web series adaptation of George Eliot’s 1871 novel Middlemarch, written and directed by Rebecca Shoptaw, an undergraduate film student at Yale. Spanning seventy short episodes, the series is set in a contemporary fictional college in Connecticut and incorporates LGBTQ themes.
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Dzanc Publisher Steps Down, Young Adult Book Twitter, and More
The Nation announces two new poetry editors; breaking into the publishing industry as a tie-in writer; new books for young readers depict the Syrian refugee crisis; and other news.
José Eduardo Agualusa
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“It’s a notebook, it’s not a collection of poems, it’s not exactly a novel, no fiction, what is this? Nobody knows.” In this video, Angolan author José Eduardo Agualusa talks about being influenced by Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. Agualusa won the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award for his novel A General Theory of Oblivion (Vintage, 2016) with Daniel Hahn, who translated the book from the Portuguese.
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