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:

The New York Times profiles Yu Xiuhua, one of China’s most famous poets. Yu, who has cerebral palsy and has written most of her poetry in a farmhouse in Hubei province, became an Internet sensation in 2014 and is now considered the Emily Dickinson of China [2].

“Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.” In honor of the solar eclipse that will be visible today from North America, the Atlantic has published Annie Dillard’s classic essay “Total Eclipse [3],” about viewing a total solar eclipse in 1979.

“What would happen if we allowed our hardened sense of what is real to melt a little? What would happen if we allowed ourselves to be uncertain—about the other, about ourselves?” Nicole Krauss talks with the Guardian [4] about creating malleable characters, writing about Israel, and her new novel, Forest Dark.

British science fiction writer Brian Aldiss died on Saturday [5] at age ninety-two. (Bookseller)

At the New Yorker, James Wood considers Norwegian fiction writer and poet Gunnhild Øyehaug [6] and her “playful, often surreal, intellectually rigorous, and brief” work.

Hell tea, cheap Chinese buffets, and Persian stew—poet Kaveh Akbar shares his food and writing quirks [7]. (Entropy)

Writer Anne Gisleson offers book suggestions from her book club, Existential Crisis Reading Group [8], including Louise Glück’s poetry, Camus’s Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, and Michael Eric Dyson’s Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America. (Literary Hub)

Katherine Rosman considers the growing number of books that imagine alternative histories of public figures [9], including a book by Diane Clehane that imagines Princess Diana survived the 1997 car crash and a forthcoming title by Curtis Sittenfeld where Hillary Rodham never marries Bill Clinton. (New York Times)