TODAY: In 1932, British novelist Beryl Bainbridge, five times nominated for the Man Booker Prize, is born.
- Adrian McKinty tries to get a little writing done in Franz Kafka’s original office.
- Maybe a bookseller can fix the mess in Washington? Meet the fifth-generation bookseller running for congress.
- From Ayelet Waldman to Georges Perec: 11 writers on the best way to organize your bookshelves.
- Forgiving the unforgivable: Geronimo’s descendants seek to salve generational trauma.
- On rape culture in crime fiction: why we keep reading (and writing about) violence against women.
- “Barack Obama has bravely tackled the complexities of his remarkable upbringing. But what would he have us learn?” A look back at Dreams From My Father. | Book Marks
- Beauty, capitalism, and the pursuit of an authentic life: how Instagram was prefigured by the picturesque. | Boston Review
- A look at the proposal for Anthony Scaramucci’s book I Did it My Way, which, like his career as White House Communications Director, is over before it really began. | Business Insider
- “This typewriter became a fetish object for me soon after I decided—at age sixteen—that I would become a writer.” Margaret Atwood on learning to type. | The Walrus
- Claire Dederer attempts to answer an age-old question, newly pressing: what do we do with the art of monstrous men? | The Paris Review
- How “Helter Skelter and Charlie Rose and South Park and The Girls and Aquarius and Kasabian and Family Guy and Nine Inch Nails and American Girls and Marilyn Manson and The Ben Stiller Show transformed a murderer into an icon of everything that was dark in the American psyche.” | The Atlantic
- “For one day the strife of parties will be hushed, the cares of business will be put aside, and all hearts will join in common emotions of gratitude and good-will.” Or: how the editor-in-chief of a 19th century women’s magazine invented Thanksgiving as we know it. | The Takeout
- Not everything is terrible: in the UK, indie bookstore sales have soared nearly 80% in the last year. | The Guardian
