TODAY: In 1694, Jonathan Swift is ordained a deacon in the Church of Ireland.
- For Freeman’s, Diego Enrique Osorno visits the world’s largest shrimp cocktail (and while he’s at it, the massacre capital of Mexico). | Literary Hub
- Learning the hard way that writing a book is nothing like writing for TV. | Literary Hub
- From dive bars to fancy libraries, how to spend a literary long weekend in Boston. | Literary Hub
- 6 famous writers who hurt themselves while writing (yes, it can be dangerous at a desk). | Literary Hub
- Meet the new bookmobile that’s coming to a (Los Angeles) street near you. | Literary Hub
- On the grad school research paper that helped me solve a 100-year-old axe murder. | Literary Hub
- New Republic literary editor Laura Marsh on Angela Carter, the pleasure of judging, and how book reviews find their audiences in the age of social media. | Book Marks
- Angela Flournoy and Issa Rae are developing a new drama for HBO—and like all great shows, it’s set in the ‘90s. | Deadline
- “Here, every morning, they began the day by talking to their dead children, weeping love and apology, as unselfconsciously as if they were speaking over a long-distance telephone line.” An excerpt from Richard Lloyd Parry’s Ghosts of the Tsunami. | Longreads
- There’s an anonymous high-profile book editor consulting on Lifetime’s publishing-centric Younger. But who could it be? | Vogue
- Leon Wieseltier’s new magazine Idea, backed by Emerson Collective, has been killed after several women accused him of sexual harassment during his three-decade tenure as a New Republic editor. | The New York Times
- Rediscovering the Russian equivalent to the Brontës (sans the posthumous fame), the Khvoshchinskaya sisters. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Bringing one of the most inaccessible corners of the book world into the digital public square: On Instagram’s growing community of rare book dealers. | The Millions
- Kerry Mansfield’s new photo book, Expired, documents library books that have been loved to death. | Hyperallergic
