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:
Lorin Stein, the editor of the Paris Review, resigned yesterday [2] amid an internal investigation into his conduct with women who worked and wrote for the magazine. Stein also resigned from his role at Farrar, Straus and Giroux [3]. (New York Times, Cut)
Meanwhile, Josephine Livingstone weighs in on Stein’s resignation and the conversation about office flirtation versus sexual harassment [4]. (New Republic)
“Writing a book is the type of project that takes a persistent focus over a long period of time, a lot of energy, a lot of work. I’m not joking when I say it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. It was pretty damn hard.” Astronaut Scott Kelly—who has spent a year in space, commanded the Space Shuttle, and flown fighter aircrafts—talks with Margaret Lazarus Dean about how hard it is to write a book [5]. Kelly and Dean cowrote Kelly’s recent memoir, Endurance. (New Yorker)
Steven D. Levitt’s Freakonomics, Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, and the pop-up edition of A Charlie Brown Christmas are among the ten thousand titles banned by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice [6] for “graphic sexual content and material that could help inmates make a weapon, plot an escape or stir disorder.” (New York Times)
The Guardian recommends eight emerging Australian writers to watch [7].
An anthropologist has found that the Agta, an indigenous group of hunter-gatherers in the Philippines, value storytelling above any other skill [8], and that storytellers have the most children. (Atlantic)
“Hardwick was interested in how we tell the stories of our lives and the lives of others, how limited but instructive are impressions (often more in relation to the teller than the told), and what duties are owed.” Thea Lenarduzzi comments on the work and influence of essayist and critic Elizabeth Hardwick [9]. (Times Literary Supplement)
NPR’s Fresh Air considers Daniel Swift’s new biography of Ezra Pound, The Bughouse, and contemplates the relationship between an artist’s life and work [10].