TODAY: In 1867, Charles Pierre Baudelaire, French poet, essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe, dies.
- So, can we actually predict earthquakes yet? Because the Big One is still coming… | Literary Hub
- “My story got accepted!” [65 likes.] “Here’s my story to read!” [3 likes.] Coming to terms with being a writer on social media. | Literary Hub
- What if all the most beautiful bookstores in the world got together to talk about how hard it is to be beautiful? | Literary Hub
- Jhumpa Lahiri looks back on her time in Italy, and what it means to fall in love with a city. | Literary Hub
- The apotheosis of the travel book form: Read a 1941 review of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. | Book Marks
- Matt Furie, the cartoonist who created Pepe the Frog—originally a fun-loving amphibian that the alt-right appropriated as a mascot of sorts—has successfully prevented the distribution of a children’s book entitled Pepe and Pede that “espoused racist, Islamophobic and hate-filled themes.” | The New York Times
- “We discovered the pleasure of unbridled, unlimited destruction, the endless joy of converting something into nothing.” Flash fiction by Aleksander Hemon. | The New Yorker
- “I’ve felt that all my writing is about complicating received narratives—because I grew up with so many.” Will Chancellor in conversation with Nick Laird. | BOMB
- Per his wishes, the late Terry Pratchett’s hard drive, containing all of his unfinished books, was destroyed by a steamroller named “Lord Jericho” at the Great Dorset Steam Fair. | The Guardian
- “I just want to capture the strangeness of being both intimate and a stranger.” An interview with poet Sally Wen Mao. | The Creative Independent
- On the essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, “who could do more in six words than any Hemingway type, including Hemingway.” | Bookforum
- How Olivia Sudjic’s novel Sympathy and the Aubrey Plaza-starring Ingrid Goes West “demonstrate [that] Instagram relies on a feedback loop of self-absorption.” | Broadly
