The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.
A trove of 20 unpublished poems by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda has been discovered among his papers in Chile. The poems were found as the Pablo Neruda Foundation was cataloging manuscripts by the writer who died in 1973. The foundation says that six of the poems are love poems, and the other 14 are on "different themes from the Nerudian universe." One of the poems, printed in El Pais, features rich nature imagery and the tenderness he is famous for ("Oscura es la noche del mundo sin ti amada mía" / "Dark is the night of the world without you my love"). Read the full poem (in Spanish) here. The poems will be published this year in Latin America and next year in Spain, but there's no news yet of an English translation.
Evie Wyld's gorgeous, grim novel All the Birds, Singing has won the Encore Award, a prize celebrating second novels. In All the Birds, Singing, a girl named Jake lives alone on a misty island, tending sheep. But something begins killing off her flock, one by one, and Jake's complicated past is revealed in a series of flashbacks. The prize is worth £10,000 (about $17,000). Wyld's first novel, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, was published in 2009.
Hard Choices, the memoir by former secretary of state (and perhaps future presidential candidate) Hillary Clinton, sold more than 100,000 copies in its first week, Simon & Schuster told The Associated Press. Company president and publisher Jonathan Karp told the news agency, "This book is on a trajectory to be the best-selling nonfiction book of the year."
"Jean Rhys was briefly in Holloway prison for assault; Elizabeth Bishop more than once drank eau de cologne, having exhausted the possibilities of the liquor cabinet." In an essay for The Guardian, Olivia Laing, the author of The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, looks at female writers and alcoholism.
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