TODAY: In 1862, American short story writer O. Henry is born.
- When your favorite writer really doesn’t like your initial designs for his book cover. | Literary Hub
- On toxic competitiveness among writers: Alex Gilvarry wonders how a male writer should be. | Literary Hub
- Nicole Krauss is still planning on reading the Russians some day… The author of Forest Dark on the book in her life. | Literary Hub
- Balzac was a clothes horse (and other revelations of 19th-century Parisian fashion). | Literary Hub
- How an evil, psychopathic clown kept me company after my grandmother died. Kayla Rae Whitaker on growing up with IT’s Pennywise. | Literary Hub
- Fierce cruelty and fierce yet redeeming love: Read a 2003 review of Khaled Housseini’s The Kite Runner. | Book Marks
- “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks—which seemed to the family AGES!” A recently auctioned letter by Charles Dickens reveals how his friendship with Hans Christian Anderson fell apart over the course of a single visit. | The Guardian
- “It is rumored gods grow / where the blood of a hanged man drips.” A poem by Nicole Sealey. | The New York Times Magazine
- “That was John’s great subject. Everything. Subjectivity itself.” Eileen Myles on John Ashbery. | OUT
- “Even if you’ve successfully written a novel, it doesn’t mean you have any idea how to write the next novel. It’s always starting from scratch.” An interview with Alexandra Kleeman. | The Creative Independent
- On Windham-Campbell prizewinning poet Ali Cobby Eckermann, who was taken at birth from her Aboriginal family as part of Australia’s “stolen generation.” | The New York Times
- “Because Muschietti’s It is almost entirely about monsters, the movie lacks the novel’s sense of ethical, even political, purpose.” What the new Stephen King adaptation misses about its source material. | The New Yorker
- Curtis Sittenfeld’s Pride and Prejudice update Eligible is getting a pilot at ABC. | Deadline
Also on Lit Hub: Read a new poem from Nicole Sealey’s collection Ordinary Beast · Audre Lorde: thoughts on apartheid, police brutality, and more · A selection and reading from Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing.
