Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories.
“I was unprepared.” Louise Glück recalls the early-morning phone call [2] yesterday that informed her she’d won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature [3]. In conversation with Alexandra Alter for the New York Times, Glück reflects on the prize, aging, teaching, and writing in the age of coronavirus.
“Tweets referred to, but couldn’t embody, the emotions: Several writers reported that they were crying.” At the New Yorker, Dan Chiasson describes the “widespread joy [4]” after news broke of Glück’s win.
Meanwhile at CNN, Richie Hoffman celebrated the new laureate and recalled the balm of teaching Glück’s poetry in the early days of the pandemic [5]. “When we needed her lessons—each of us uncertain of the future, isolated, terrified—Louise Glück has been a poet who could teach us that suffering, oblivion, even death would not be the end of us.”
The Los Angeles Times reports on the evolving world of film and television rights for books [6]. Agents and producers are noting an “extraordinary increase” in deals during the pandemic era.
Twenty-five editors at the Rumpus have written personal reflections on the upcoming presidential election [7]. In an introduction, editor in chief Marisa Siegel writes, “While we all believe that voting out the current administration is critically important, we arrive at that belief in different ways.”
Ahead of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the New York Public Library has compiled a list of twenty works by Indigenous writers [8] in the United States.
“I’m not interested in being me: I want to morph.” Lynne Tillman talks to frieze about love, tenderness, and disappearing into one’s fiction [9].
“The enormity of a library’s collection forces me to confront the sheer magnitude of all that I don’t know.” At the Millions, Ed Simon reckons with the limits of his reading life [10].