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 think one of the major roles of fiction is to explore as deeply and in as much detail as possible the wounds that remain. Because those are the scars that, for better or for worse, define and shape a person’s life.” Haruki Murakami talks about fiction [2] and his new novel, Killing Commendatore, which is excerpted in the New Yorker this week.

Comic playwright Neil Simon died yesterday [3] at age ninety-one. Simon wrote many critically acclaimed plays, including The Odd Couple and Lost in Yonkers, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991. (NPR)

“We at Shelf Awareness wonder why B&N, founded by proven book people, can’t seem to find any qualified leaders from the book business.” Shelf Awareness has invited the public to nominate and vote for the next CEO of Barnes & Noble [4]. The company abruptly fired CEO Demos Parneros in July.

Irish writer Sally Rooney [5], the “Salinger for the Snapchat generation,” talks about Irish politics, her background, and her forthcoming novel, Normal People. (Guardian)

Kola Tubosun visits Wole Soyinka at his home [6] on a forest reserve near Lagos, Nigeria. (Popula)

In 1980 two men traveled across the United States and stole thousands of rare books and prints [7] from university libraries. (Atlas Obscura) 

At the age of one hundred, A. E. Hotchner, who was close friends with Ernest Hemingway and Paul Newman [8], has written a new novel, The Amazing Adventures of Aaron Broom. (New York Times)

An unpublished haiku poem by Masaoka Shiki [9] has been found in one of the poet's notebooks. (Mainichi)