TODAY: In 1980, writer Katherine Anne Porter, whose novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America in 1962, dies.
- 75 covers of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, on the 30th anniversary of its publication. | Literary Hub
- Accessing Africa through science fiction: Deji Bryce Olukotun imagines the future of Nigeria. | Literary Hub
- When Chicago was the real literary capital of America. | Literary Hub
- Writing my trauma with a little help from a Jason Bourne car chase. | Literary Hub
- Waiting for the war to start: in Vietnam with Echo Company, on the eve of the Tet Offensive. | Literary Hub
- “Until this novel, it had never crossed my mind to think about the collective memories of people alive at a certain time.” A profile of Jennifer Egan. | Publishers Weekly
- “Maybe my cheap and vulgar praise can only face these blasphemous poems, paintings, images. . .” The final piece of writing by Liu Xiaobo. | New York Review of Books
- Pankaj Mishra on “the ideas and commitments of the new prophets of [the] decline” of Western civilization. | London Review of Books
- Roald Dahl’s widow said in an interview that before his agent advised against it, her husband had originally written Charlie Bucket as a “little black boy.” | The New York Times
- On the “important British tradition” of complaining about the Man Booker Prize and the implications of including American authors. | The New Republic
- “I really wanted my writing to reach a new audience. Actually, I really wanted to be able to afford furniture.” On watching your debut novel become a movie, 14 years after its publication. | The Atlantic
- On the relationship between Ivanka and Donald Trump and Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” a poem that “excoriates the Daddy-Daughter relationship.” | BLARB
- In Satrapi’s Iran, one is forbidden to be truly and fully Iranian: On Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. | Book Marks
Also on Literary Hub: Each generation must write the wrongs of history • On pantomime and the classic stage • From Ben Loory’s new collection, “Elmore Leonard“
