TODAY: In 1972, Pulitzer Prize winner poet Tracy K. Smith, the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States, is born.
- These five books just won Pulitzer Prizes. | Book Marks
- “If Buttigieg is elected, do I think it bodes well for his presidency that his favorite book is Ulysses? Yes.” Tyler Malone on judging candidates by their shelves. | Lit Hub
- “Maybe I want to be more political and more radical, but what I really want to do is regain life.” On Heike Geissler’s grim account of the Amazon workplace. | Lit Hub
- How conspiracy enters the American mainstream, from irradiated milk to demonic minions. | Lit Hub
- Julián Herbert chronicles a forgotten massacre of Chinese immigrants during the Mexican Revolution. | Lit Hub
- “I too had lived through these times. They weren’t just history to me, they were part of life.” Joshua Furst on the urgency of historical fiction. | Lit Hub
- “Expose the fetus to a good balance of manly influences while in utero,” and more tips on raising a strapping boy-child (Victorian-style). | Lit Hub
- “If you appreciate and understand the importance of strong literary criticism and voices in a noisy world, please join us”: a letter from the President of the National Book Critics Circle. | Book Marks
- Allen Morris Jones on the gruff benevolence and enduring talent of beloved crime icon Jim Crumley. | CrimeReads
- Nearly 100 years after they were written, two previously unknown poems by Daphne du Maurier were discovered in a picture frame. | Daily Mail
- “This may be unpleasant to consider, may even be a bad place to begin, but if there were a nicer way to tell this story it wouldn’t be this story.” This story being a new one by Catherine Lacey. | The New Yorker
- Paco Ignacio Taibo II is an outspoken Mexican writer and activist who runs the Fondo de Cultura Económica publishing group. He has a progressive—and politically bold—plan to rehabilitate his country, using its literature. | The Nation
- “Identity is always a negotiation between the way that you see yourself and the way society and institutions see you.” Read an interview with Thomas Chatterton Williams. | LARB
- Science fiction writer Gene Wolfe, whom Ursula K. Le Guin called “our Melville,” has died. | Tor
- “To hell with 2016”: Ben Fountain on Trump, tribalism, and nurturing our better angels. | TriQuarterly
- Here’s the Ian McEwan interview that’s pissing off every science fiction writer (and reader)! | The Guardian
Also on Lit Hub: On So Many Damn Books, Lauren Wilkinson on writing the family life of a spy • Literary Disco talks Jane Austen’s enduring genius • Cecelia Ahern on how she writes a novel a year • A poem from Forrest Gander’s Be With, winner of the Pulitzer Prize • Read from Dana Grigorcea’s An Instinctive Feeling of Innocence (trans. Alta L. Price)
