TODAY: In 1911, poet and short story writer Elizabeth Bishop is born.
- “Extremely difficult to read due to the gibberish conversations.” The 50 best one-star Amazon reviews of The Sound and the Fury. | Lit Hub
- Standing at ground zero for UFO believers: a scientist studies our need to believe in aliens. | Lit Hub
- “He loathed to see a bus full of tourists stop by the bagel shop and call attention to him as a beatnik.” Tosh Berman on his dad, Wallace, and the postwar California art scene. | Lit Hub
- “You don’t stop. You can’t. You weren’t lying about the iceberg. So you write another essay.” Mateo Askaripour on racism, writing, and the places we leave behind. | Lit Hub
- Natasha Wimmer, translator of The Spirit of Science Fiction, on translating Bolaño (and his obsessions). | Lit Hub
- New titles from Marlon James, Yiyun Li, Angie Thomas, and more all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
- From Harlan Coben’s “Tell No One,” to Patricia Highsmith’s “Strangers on a Train,” Tom Hunt looks at 10 crime books featuring ordinary people in extraordinary situations. | CrimeReads
- A once-rejected George Orwell essay on British food was published by the British Council—the same arts organization that turned it down more than 70 years ago. | ABC News
- Great news for the writers of this newsletter: books are not dead. | Time
- Is Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive the next “great American novel”? | Vanity Fair
- From Strega Nona to Where the Wild Things Are to Goodnight Moon: on the gay history of America’s classic children’s books. | T Magazine
- Today, in Not Everything is Bad: Michael B. Jordan is producing a film adaptation of Marlon James’ Black Leopard, Red Wolf. | Deadline
- “Diana and Nikon works with utter (and sometimes peculiar) precision and decisive authority while at the same time doubling back on itself, retreading ideas and refining them.” Alice Bolin on Janet Malcolm’s first book. | Tin House
- As long as the machines can’t turn pages, we’re safe: a gallery of glimpses of human hands in Google Books scans. | Wired
Also on Lit Hub: What Barry Jenkins missed in the adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk • Three poems by Thea Brown from her collection Famous Times • Read from The Study of Animal Languages
