TODAY: In 1788, Filipino poet Francisco Balagtas is born.
- From flash fiction to true crime, 20 books you should readthis April. | Lit Hub
- Rachel Z. Arndt on the anxiety of the chronically early: “I started wearing a watch as soon as I could tell time.” | Lit Hub
- 10 new poetry collectionsto read in April. | Lit Hub
- Jenny Boully: How the make-believe worldof Peter Pan inspired my writing. | Lit Hub
- Becoming a prison journalistfrom the inside. | Lit Hub
- Sean Penn is far from the only celeb to stray from his lane in recent years: The good, the bad, and the ugly of celebrity fiction. | Book Marks
- “She was and is my favorite author, a lame epithet for someone whose fiction has caused my bones to blossom.” Karen Russell on Joy Williams and her recently reissued second novel, The Changeling. | The New Yorker
- What is it about the novel that vexed critics into silence? Nathan Goldman on Clarice Lispector’s The Chandelier. | The Nation
- “It’s unfortunate that every single week there is another world event that happens that makes the language even more relevant.” On Kamilah Forbes’s stage adaptation of Between the World and Me. | The New York Timers
- No other walk on Earth made sense to me, or my rage: Rahawa Haile on walking from Selma to Montgomery after the election. | BuzzFeed Books
- On the nationalist origins of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, which was created “with the express purpose of creating a single definition of American English.” | The Paris Review
- Two renderings of “purgatorial space” and “parental loss,” Fever Dream and Lincoln in the Bardo, face off in the final round of the Tournament of Books. | The Morning News
- Laura Marsh on David Friend’s The Naughty Nineties, which is “valuable precisely because it records what so many people believed, until just now, about the state of sex in the 1990s.” | NYRB
