TODAY: In 1930, Sinclair Lewis becomes the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
I feel dance has something to tell me about what I do: Zadie Smith offers dance lessons for writers. | The Guardian- “I understood then, for the first time, that geography, language, society, politics, the whole history of a people, were for me in the books that I loved and which I could enter as if I were writing them.” An excerpt from Elena Ferrante’s Frantumaglia. | The New Yorker
- “Was it also different for the animals, under communism and under capitalism?” Rivka Galchen and Yoko Tawada visit the Berlin Zoo, the source of inspiration for Memoirs of a Polar Bear. | T Magazine
- “I don’t know what else to do, so I write. It’s my way of seeing the world.” Discussing sex and observing birds with Jim Harrison. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- There was so much more to the ’80s than the cartoon version I’d been regurgitating: Six writers on recreating the ever-popular decade. | Vulture
- Counting down to Wordstock with writing by Helen Phillips, Emma Straub, Sherman Alexie, and Kevin Young. | Tin House
- Guernica has relaunched with fiction by Ha Jin, an interview with Alexandra Kleeman, and more. | Guernica
- Make fiction fun again: On the “literary brat pack” of the 80s: Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, Donna Tartt and Jill Eisenstadt. | Harper’s Bazaar
- Writing “fierce women who could be as intimidating as they are intriguing:” Roxane Gay on her Marvel comic series. | EW
- Surely there are inaccessible places in each of us: An excerpt from Kelly Luce’s novel Pull Me Under. | Joyland
- “The world feels so endlessly permanent, and yet people have always been preparing for the apocalypse.” An interview with Michelle Tea. | BOMB Magazine
- A parallel-text English and Arabic edition of Instructions Within, the poetry collection that resulted in Ashraf Fayadh’s arrest and (later overturned) death sentence, will be published in November. | Publishers Weekly
- Mauro Javier Cardenas on the performance of interiority, forging a world through syntax, and disfiguring language. | Words Without Borders
- “Revisiting a story gives us an opportunity to explore universal experiences from the perspective of those who weren’t represented in the original:” On the importance of queer retellings of classic stories. | VICE
- “I had to find a form that could polychromatically meet the charged, protean appetites of my characters’s emotional needs.” An interview with Vi Khi Nao. | Electric Literature
And on Literary Hub:
Rebecca Solnit: “Dear Donald Trump, you should visit the city of New York someday.” · 16 books you should read this November. · Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump: What do they read? · On Neil Gaiman, Jose Saramago, and the way we gender Death. · Javier Marías on dictatorship, Shakespeare, and literary ghosts. · Mychal Denzel Smith puts together a black boy literary survival kit. · 22 famous writers weigh in on Trump. · Fujimori Nakamura: I write dark stories because I am dark. · On Clarice Lispector, Alejandra Pizarnik, and poetic voice(lessness). · The horror of language and the horror of Trump.
