TODAY: In 1566, Louise Labé, also identified as La Belle Cordière, feminist French poet of the Renaissance, dies.
- Margaret Atwood on the origins of The Handmaid’s Tale and the anxiety around its publication. | Lit Hub
- For Geoff Dyer, the photographs of Garry Winogrand contain entire novels of human experience. | Lit Hub
- Nafissa Thompson-Spires: What if readers are learning the wrong lessons from my writing? | Lit Hub
- “Writers obviously know the power of words, and how naming something sets it on a certain path.” Marie Myung-Ok Lee on the way authors construct their bylines. | The Millions
- “Every book, I have a nervous breakdown.” An interview with newly-minted Pulitzer winner Andrew Sean Greer. | Esquire
- When the fictional wildfire of your novel spreads to real life. | Lit Hub
- Nathan Goldman on criticism “as thinking about, with, and by means of texts, rather than just evaluating them.” | Book Marks
- “His father was friends with princes; he consorted with dead animals.” How a wealthy scion accumulated the world’s finest feather collection, then lost it all to blackmail. | CrimeReads
- Zachary Pace is born again to the sublime noise of Kim Gordon and Sonic Youth. | Lit Hub
- Why Jane Austen—“an authority on the complexity of life, particularly with regard to the intricacies of relationships”—is so frequently cited in legal decisions. | Electric Literature
- Every colonized person is a poet as soon as she uses the language trying to break her to rebuke and dismantle itself: A poetry manifesto by Harmony Holiday. | The Poetry Society
- James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty sold 600,000 copies in its first week—more than Hillary Clinton and Michael Wolff’s books combined. | The New York Times
- “Death lurks throughout Britton’s poems, but he seems to pull away from it rather than resign himself to it.” Remembering poet Donald Britton, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1994. | Poetry Foundation
Also on Literary Hub: Write brain/Art brain: Johan Harstad, writer, designs his own covers · “Spell,” a new poem by Ann Lauterbach · Read from Elizabeth Winthrop’s new novel, The Mercy Seat
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