TODAY: In 1902, Arna Bontemps, poet, novelist, and librarian, is born.
- Andrea Kleine on how the story of a murder from her childhood secretly became the topic for her novel. | Literary Hub
- Lincoln Michel reveals his animal side: books with beasts, a reading list. | Literary Hub
- The President has “a conversation with somebody who [he] enjoy[s] and [is] interested in,” Marilynne Robinson. | NYRB
- In which Jonathan Franzen (profiled by Rachel Kushner) is put on the same level as Rihanna (profiled by Miranda July). | T Magazine
- “All of a parent’s feelings are dangerous, you motherfucker.” A short story by Ben Marcus. | The New Yorker
- Margaret Atwood talks for-profit prison schemes, infatuation, and speakable acts, without once making her interviewer cry. | Hazlitt
- Permeability, penetrability, and psychic/political liberation in Leonora Carrington’s memoir of madness, Down Below. | Verso Books
- Constructing the literary life of a great poet: an interview with the author of a new (and disavowed) biography of Ted Hughes. | NPR
- Language activism, replicating sonic textures, and oral traditions: On the state of indigenous Mexican poetry. | Asymptote Journal
Also on Literary Hub: Is Topeka, Kansas the most poetic city in America? · Testimony from the children of Chernobyl: the work of Svetlana Alexievich · A look inside Riverbend Books, an indie bookstore in Australia · An excerpt from Ben Lerner’s 10:04, now out in paperback
