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:
Over the weekend it was reported that police [2] on the campus of University of California in Berkeley injured students and professors [3], including poet Geoffrey O'Brien [4] and seventy-year-old former poet laureate Robert Hass, who were voicing their opposition to a state-wide tuition hike. (KTVU, ABC, Huffington Post)
GalleyCat has obtained a memo indicating the publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will restructure [5].
Leora Skolkin-Smith, who studied fiction with Donald Barthelme and was inspired by conversations with Susan Sontag, details what kept her going in the thirty years it took to publish her novel [6], Hystera, which is out this week. (Center for Fiction)
Flavorwire lists ten famous literary characters [7] and the real-life figures they were modeled after.
A follow-up to the Q. R. Markham scandal [8]: Despite the plagiarized novel being pulled from shelves, Kirkus Reviews lists the title "Best of 2011 [9]," and a peer of the beleaguered Markham, whose actual name is Quentin Rowan, posted an apology from Rowan [10] via e-mail.
Tonight the venerable literary magazine Ploughshares is hosting its fortieth anniversary party [11]. (Boston Herald)
Elsewhere in Boston, local poets are lending their voices [12] (and humor) to the Occupy Boston encampment. (Boston Globe)
Reviewing Claire Tomalin's new biography, Charles Dickens: A Life, we learn that while writing Bleak House the great novelist worked himself into "a perpetual scald and boil," after which he would call for a "cold pail of water into which he would plunge his head [13]." (Barnes and Noble Review)