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:
British musician Morrissey’s debut novel, List of the Lost, was announced the winner of the U.K.’s 2015 Bad Sex in Fiction Award. The prize has been awarded annually since 1993 by Britain’s Literary Review “to draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction, and to discourage them.” (Associated Press)
“Yet to create anything genuinely new writers need to risk failure, indeed to court failure, aesthetically and commercially, and to do it again and again throughout their lives, something not easy to square with the growing tendency to look on fiction writing as a regular career.” Tim Parks considers how an author’s commercial success might cause one to write towards conformity. (New York Review of Books)
Variety reports that Papa, the Ernest Hemingway biopic, has been set for an international premiere on December 5 at Cuba’s thirty-seventh International Festival of New Latin Cinema in Havana. Papa is the first Hollywood film shot on location in Cuba since the 1959 revolution.
At Full Stop, poet Chris Martin talks about his new collection The Falling Down Dance and what he wants poetry to do: “I want poetry to till and tilt. I want it to renew and restage difficult questions from unexpected perspectives.”
NPR features an interview with several people associated with the first museum retrospective devoted to the legacy of the Black Mountain College, the liberal arts college open from 1933 to 1957 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, whose faculty included poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, among many other seminal artists and writers. The exhibition, called “Leap Before You Look,” is open now at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.
A debate between Gerald Howard, the editor of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life, and book critic Daniel Mendelsohn—who published a bad review of the novel earlier this month—appears in the new issue of the New York Review of Books. In a response to the review, Howard objects to Mendelsohn’s charge that the novel, “to use his word, ‘duped’ its readers into feeling the emotions of pity and terror and sadness and compassion.” In his own response, Mendelsohn holds firm that “Yanagihara’s slathering-on of trauma is, in the end, a crude and inartistic way of wringing emotion from the reader.” The best-selling A Little Life was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award.
In a piece for the Wall Street Journal, Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch writes about the future of publishing: “I’ve been hearing about the demise of book publishing since the first day I stepped through the doors of a publisher back in 1978. But here we are still, publishers like Little, Brown, with histories going back 100 and 200 years. What other American industry has companies still in existence after two centuries, evolving and modernizing but still doing much the same work?”
