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:
A preservation expert at Columbia University and his students are collaborating with the Morgan Library—the famed rare-book collection of financier Pierpont Morgan—to investigate the truth behind the beloved smell of old books [2]. The group is using a glass bell to capture the scent of a book, which will then be analyzed at a perfume lab. (New York Times)
Vice has published excerpts of the Pen-City Writers, a literary journal of stories written by inmates at the John B. Connally Unit [3], a maximum-security prison in southern Texas. The inmates wrote the stories in a workshop led by fiction writer Deb Olin Unferth [4], who is developing the workshop into a two-year certificate writing program.
The Guardian profiles the London-based collective Naked Boys Reading [5], which hosts literary salons where men read naked.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks with NPR about her new book, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions [6], which comes out tomorrow from Random House and adapts a letter Adichie wrote to her friend about how to raise her daughter as a feminist.
Writer and children’s book author Paula Fox died [7] last Wednesday at age ninety-three. Fox was known for her novels Poor George and Desperate Characters. (Washington Post)
Ursula K. Le Guin answers twenty questions [8] about her favorite books, whether Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series is overrated, and her favorite field in California. (Times Literary Supplement)
“But I try to adhere to the facts as I know them, even when I think they don’t matter…. I’ve been driven deeper into questions because of that imperative toward veracity….” Essayist Eula Biss discusses how “facts can be a complicated endeavor [9].” (Los Angeles Review of Books)
Jim Milliot looks back on the achievements of publisher HarperCollins [10], which celebrates its two-hundredth anniversary this year. (Publishers Weekly)