New Stephen King Book Features Writing Tips, Rita Dove on Toni Morrison, and More

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:

Stephen King will publish a new short story collection this November. The Bazaar of Bad Dreams includes twenty short stories, with an author introduction to each story, and insights into King’s writing process. (Guardian)

At the New Yorker’s Poetry Podcast, poet Major Jackson reads Derek Walcott’s poem “In Italy” and talks about his admiration for Walcott’s verse with New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon.

Writers and critics have been debating the “death of the novel” since the form came to prominence. According to Vox, the novel has been declared dead thirty times since 1902.

“Toni Morrison has always seemed both rooted in the earth and poised for flight, resplendent and serene. Most importantly, she has woven tales that beguile, even as they lead us deeper into the carefully shielded psyche of homo sapiens than we knew to go.” At the National Book Critics Award Ceremony last week, Rita Dove honored Toni Morrison before Morrison received the NBCC’s Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

Oliver Kamm wants to put to rest the claim that proper English grammar usage is in decline. Kamm suggests grammar pedants’ rules are not “real rules of grammar at all. They are, at best, just stylistic conventions.” (Wall Street Journal)

“I find it ever more disorienting…to read novels set in this ‘nostalgic present,’ ambiguously atemporal…or…set very clearly in the present but without its technological trappings. These avoidances make the art seem less vital, less able to speak to the present, and like a choice more concerned with making things easy on writers than with offering something to readers.” At the Millions, Steve Himmer discusses how avoiding the technological realities of the present in fiction could be problematic.

Watch two rockers-turned-writers in conversation at Electric Literature: Kim Gordon of the band Sonic Youth, whose memoir Girl in a Band was released last month, and Carrie Brownstein of the band Sleater-Kinney, who will publish her first memoir this year.