TODAY: In 1952, author bell hooks is born.
- “I can think of no other non-fiction book that evokes more successfully the special taste and feeling of a game and the men who play it.” Read a 1967 review of George Plimpton’s book of immersive football journalism, Paper Lion. | Book Marks
- “My extended family presents a stark picture of what it is to live in a state, in a country, that does not think that access to quality physical and mental health care is a human right.” Jesmyn Ward on her Mississippi hometown. | Harper’s
- “It’s a gift of human consciousness that we know we’re going to die, but a limitation that we don’t know how it will happen.” Sarah Gerard on hurricanes. | The Baffler
- James Patterson and Bill Clinton’s forthcoming thriller The President Is Missing is set to be adapted by Showtime after a “high-stakes (and almost certainly high-dollar) bidding war.” | Vulture
- “Whenever he caught himself thinking of Charles, he flinched and felt the table shift a little, as if he’d fallen asleep at the wheel and come to just before driving off the road.” Short fiction by Brandon Taylor. | Joyland
- How Armed Services Editions—softcover books designed especially to fit in soldiers’ pockets during WWII—finally made the mass market paperback popular in America. | Atlas Obscura
- “The concrete edifice rocked back and forth dementedly, heavily, impossibly.” Francisco Goldman’s personal history of Mexico City, in earthquakes. | The New Yorker
- “There’s nothing inherently exciting about any narrative move: it’s only exciting if it works . . . Everything else is gimmickry.” A profile of Jennifer Egan. | The Guardian
