TODAY: In 1836, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, explorer and author of the autobiographical The Hasheesh Eater about the explorations of altered states of consciousness, is born.
- Debut novelists (and cousins!) Gabriel Urza and Sean Bernard on writing, family, and being Basque. | Literary Hub
- Ursula K. Le Guin on not burning the past, insolent children, and craft that goes beyond “some little artisan putting the yeast in his handcrafted bread.” | Interview
- A convoluted trail of bovine publishers leads us, perhaps, to a new Thomas Pynchon novel. | Harper’s
- Seamus Heaney’s unpublished translation of Book VI of The Aeneid will venture up from the underworld. | The Guardian
- Jonathan Franzen, a famous adversary of book clubs, has selected Kenzaburo Oe’s A Personal Matter for the one he is hosting. | The Wall Street Journal
- Jesse Eisenberg sees writing and acting as similar (both involve “trying to understand the emotion underneath a character”) and different (“my stupid haircut is nowhere to be seen” in his debut collection). | Barnes & Noble Review
- Artists over saints: on Truman Capote’s “elaborate self-portrait,” Music for Chameleons. | The Atlantic
- Writing about the gross and the boring (marriage): an interview with Lauren Groff. | The Oyster Review
- Today in the Best American Poetry debacle: the sister of Yi-Fen Chou condemns Michael Derrick Hudson’s “careless disregard for Chinese people” and Sherman Alexie expresses regret that it “has taken so much attention away from all of [the other] great poems.” Agreed on both counts. | The New York Times, BuzzFeed News
Also on Literary Hub: Charlie Brown as Gregor Samsa, on the 100th anniversary of The Metamorphosis · Ryan Berg namedrops all of our favorites: James Baldwin, William Maxwell, and Simon Le Bon · From Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s Man Asian Literary Prize shortlisted Between Clay and Dust
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