TODAY: In 1891, Herman Melville dies.
- Is the Rust Belt ruined? Or is it having a renaissance? On the up-and-coming publisher letting Midwesterners tell their own stories. | Literary Hub
- When I’m writing fiction, I cannot read it: Anna Korkeakivi on the reading habits of working novelists. | Literary Hub
- Interview with a gatekeeper: FSG’s Colin Dickerman isn’t as shy as he thinks. | Literary Hub
- How New Orleans became the Paris of the Mississippi. | Literary Hub
- Sarah Perry: “I didn’t want to write another dead mother memoir.” | Literary Hub
- Was this whole mess inevitable? On the ongoing fallout of post-Cold War triumphalism. | Literary Hub
- “If she has ‘nerves,’ she also has ‘nerve’ in the sense of boldness and fortitude.” Read Elizabeth Hardwick writing on Joan Didion in 1996. | Book Marks
- “America seems to be very exercised about sex.” What the 10 most challenged books of 2016 have in common. | The New York Times
- Celeste Ng on Goodnight, Moon, which “presents you with a range of ambiguous details, asking you to make connections and supply cause and effect . . . the book teaches you that you have to look twice.” | The Atlantic
- “The cosmic bomb is to the H-bomb what an earthquake is to hiccups.” A newly discovered story by Kurt Vonnegut. | The Nation
- Why we still need the “generosity and literary imagination” of Stuart Hall. | The New Republic
- “Without thought to how poems will eventually be shared, I just try to write the best poems I can, given my limitations as an imperfect person.” An interview with Nicole Sealey. | The Barnes & Noble Review
- How death affects the reception of a writer’s work. | Guernica
- “The industry needs writers and, black-hole-like, is sucking in galaxies of them.” Aleksander Hemon on what he learned writing for Netflix’s Sense8. | The New Yorker
