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:

Charles McGrath profiles novelist Anne Tyler [2], who is “not a recluse exactly—or, as one critic called her, the Greta Garbo of the literary world—but…a creature of rigorous habit…” Tyler’s twenty-second novel, Clock Dance, will come out next week. (New York Times)

Researchers at the University of Southern Denmark found arsenic-laced pigment inside three medieval tomes [3] dating back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (Smithsonian)

Barnes & Noble has fired its CEO, Demos Parneros [4], for “violations of the Company’s policies.” Parneros was fired immediately and without severance. (Publishers Weekly)

The New Yorker considers the legacy of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis [5], one of Brazil’s greatest writers who “managed, with unruffled elegance and composure, to say the most outrageous things.”

“You can put your thing down, flip it, and reverse it: that’s the crowd’s ars poetica.” Poet Anne Boyer considers the performances of Missy Elliot [6]. (Harper’s Magazine)

Yelena Moskovich offers a “summer reading list for misfits [7],” with books that aren’t page-turners but the “weirdly formatted ones, the rhythmic ones, the ones that feel too much…” (Paris Review)

Meanwhile, Real Simple rounds up the best books of 2018 so far [8], including R. O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries and Katharine Dion’s The Dependents.

Dion and Kwon are both featured in the latest issue of Poets & Writers as part of the eighteenth annual First Fiction feature [9].

Jezebel [10]interviews Samantha Hunt [10] about women’s identity, mermaids, and her first novel, The Seas.