Margaret Atwood is writing a new poetry collection. According to a statement by the publisher, the poems in Dearly will explore “bodies and minds in transition, as well as the everyday objects and rituals that embed us in the present.” The collection will be published by Ecco in November.
Former Texas Tribune editor Emily Ramshaw and Tribune chief audience officer Amanda Zamora are starting a women-focused nonprofit news organization. The 19th, named after the amendment that granted white women the right to vote, is backed by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark among other donors. “This isn’t the day’s news but pink. This is unique, original coverage about the roles of gender in politics and policy,” Ramshaw explained. “We are not doing turn-of-the-screw reporting, but rather what that turn of the screw means for different parts of the women’s electorate.”
On the First Draft podcast, Mitzi Rapkin talks to Ethan Rutherford about friendship, consistency, and his new story collection, The Peripatetic Coffin. “I like short story collections that don’t restate the same thing over and over,” he explained. “When I sit down to write it’s a version of that question, ‘Where do I want to go today? Where do I want to spend my time?’ Sometimes that was aboard a submarine; sometimes, it was in the future aboard a futuristic whaling expedition. Sometimes it’s in your own memory in the sort of nostalgia for the mid-80s and Brian Bosworth and the Seattle Seahawks.”
Claire Armitstead and Mary Beard discuss the evolution of artistic nudes.
The Observer has selected its ten most anticipated debut novelists of this year. Authors include Deepa Anappara, Paul Mendez, and Louise Hare, among others.
Mediaite talks to New York Times columnist Jim Rutenberg about transitioning out of media coverage and into a writer at large for the paper. “When I came into the column . . . I got this sort of sobering lecture, here at the building, that ‘you need to understand how things are in terms of the financials and we are just about to go through a really rough period,’ and that suddenly really changed. I guess we could call it the ‘Trump effect,’” he remembered. Rutenberg took over the column from David Carr in 2016. “There were times when I was doing a story on a subject that he had tackled earlier,” he said, “and a lot of those were like the whole world turned upside down from when wrote about it.”
