Literary Hub has started a new series featuring contemporary poetry from Ukraine. The first column includes three poems by Iya Kiva.
The New York Times has profiled Kiara Barrow and Rebecca Panovka, the founding editors of the journal The Drift. In the first issue, released in 2020, the editors wrote: “We’re committed to offering a forum for young people who haven’t yet been absorbed into the media hivemind, and don’t feel hemmed in by the boundaries of the existing discourse. These are times in which the world needs fresh voices.” Since that first issue, editors and literary agents have been seeking out the journal’s contributors. Says Christopher Beha: “The best place you can publish right now if you want to get noticed by me and Harper’s is The Drift.”
Book deals: Pantheon has purchased Laila Lalami’s sixth book, a novel titled The Dream Hotel, which follows “a museum archivist who gets detained after a predictive algorithm uses her dreams to determine she will commit a crime.” In collaboration with the New Yorker, Celadon Press will publish The January 6th Report, a collection of articles about the attack on the US Capitol. Random House has acquired the rights to Gary Shteyngart’s new novel about multiple generations of a Russian American/Korean American family.
In his latest Substack workshop, George Saunders argues that the messy, undecided parts of a story-in-progress can be a sign of great potential: “Since I first stumbled on this idea, I’ve found it oddly comforting. If I have a story that is a mess, full of places I can’t live with, instead of thinking, you know, ‘And you call yourself a professional writer? Just look at the mess you’ve made!’ I try to think, ‘Ah, you have skillfully revised yourself into a place where the key to getting the story to its higher ground lies in this little handful of messy places. Good for you! And look, there are only, like, six of them. And they are messy because—well, because they have the potential to be really beautiful, but they don’t know how yet, the poor things.’”
Tomorrow (Tuesday) at 7:30pm EST, Community Bookstore will host a conversation between authors Andrew Martin and Lynn Steger Strong about the new English translation of Yūko Tsushima’s Woman Running in the Mountains.