TODAY: In 1898, Spanish poet and Nobel prize winner Vicente Aleixandre is born.
- Susan Orlean talks to Paul Holdengraber about the childhood joy of library visits, and the importance of preserving the stories that comprise a culture. | Lit Hub
- Astral lit: Van Morrison, unlikeliest of literary muses. | Lit Hub
- So when, exactly, do children mistakenly start thinking they hate poetry? | Lit Hub
- South Korea is the new Scandinavia: Paul French on the next big thing in crime writing. | CrimeReads
- Dwight Garner on Rachel Kushner’s new “muscle car” of a novel, Curtis Sittenfeld on the women’s suffrage movement, and three more must-read reviews of the week. | Book Marks
- “I’m writing about queer women who are also immigrants, who are also at the crux of their community, who are also working class women . . .” An interview with Elaine Castillo. | AAWW
- “I wanted to be immune to time, the pain of it. But pretending didn’t make it so.” An excerpt from Melissa Broder’s The Pisces. | BuzzFeed Reader
- Henri Cole wanders around Paris and thinks about Rilke, loneliness, and Brokeback Mountain. | Lit Hub
- Ibrahim Nasrallah’s dystopian novel The Second War of the Dog has won the International prize for Arabic fiction. | The Guardian
- The great Elizabeth Catte on two new books about “the perils and promise of the nation’s most controversial state” (Texas). | The Boston Review
- Hulu has two rather different literary TV series in the works: one an adaptation of Lindy West’s Shrill—and the other, a reboot of Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero. | Hollywood Reporter, Deadline
- “Just like myths that contain a whole world within them, our blue voyage is the myth of a complete family.” Aysegul Savas on the family boat trips that defined her childhood. | Guernica
- This means nothing to us, but: George R.R. Martin has announced that “Archmaester Gyldayn has at last completed and delivered the first half of his monumental history of the Targaryen kings of Westeros.” | Not A Blog
Also on Literary Hub: A new generation of African poets: Poetry by Omotara James, Rasaq Malik, and Alexis Teyie · The ways we read: On the fragility of words on a page · Short fiction by Nick Fuller Googins from the new issue of The Southern Review.
