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:

“I must do do do and yet there is the brick wall that I must kick over stone by stone. It is I who have built the wall and I who must tear it down.” Image has published Flannery O’Connor’s college journal [2], which reveals the writer’s self-consciousness and self-doubt, as well as her determination. (Atlantic)

Amazon editors have announced their top hundred books of the year [3], with David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI as their No. 1 pick, followed by Celeste Ng’s novel Little Fires Everywhere.

Last Friday poet and memoirist Reginald Dwayne Betts was approved to practice law in Connecticut [4]; Betts had previously been denied entrance into the bar based on a felony conviction when he was sixteen. (New Yorker)

Poets Charles Simic and Katha Pollitt weigh in on the year since Donald Trump was elected president [5]. “I sometimes feel like I’m a different person now,” says Pollitt [6]. “Every monster in history, as we ought to remember, has needed a lot of help to implement his policies,” says Simic [7]. (New York Review of Books)

At the Boston Review, Elizabeth Catte explores the myths about race in Appalachia that inform J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy [8], “our political moment’s favorite text for understanding the lives of disaffected Donald Trump voters.”

HarperCollins will publish Michael Bond’s last Paddington Bear book [9] in June 2018, on the first anniversary of the author’s death. (Guardian)

The Smithsonian explores how an anonymous sequel to Cervantes’s Don Quixote [10], written in the early 1600s, prefigured modern piracy.

Writer Robin Benway talks with Bustle [11] about getting rejected from every MFA program she applied to and her book Far From the Tree, which is now a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award in Young People’s Literature.