TODAY: In 1877, cookbook enthusiast Alice B. Toklas, pictured here with her partner Gertrude Stein, is born.
- Joshua Wheeler on the first ever full-length film streamed on the internet (it’s even weirder than you’d imagine). | Lit Hub
- From the literary erudition of John Keene to the origin story of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the Lit Hub staff’s favorite stories of the month. | Lit Hub
- Our imaginations need to dwell where the wild things are: how children’s literature leads us to the uncanny. | Lit Hub
- 10 crime books to read this May, including new releases from Jessica Knoll, Alex Segura, and Ruth Ware. | CrimeReads
- “Some novelists are sorely handicapped by their admiration for William Faulkner. Cormac McCarthy is one of these.” The first reviews of every Cormac McCarthy novel. | Book Marks
- “I know a poem’s a poem when I have to invent the language for it.” An interview with Sandra Cisneros. | Ploughshares
- “The idea is that seeing America through the lens of the slave trade—despite its broad stain on the country’s history—is best done from the point of view of a single person who had their life forever altered by it.” Hanif Abdurraqib on Zora Neale Hurston’s previously unpublished book Barracoon. | 4Columns
- Over the period of hours that I have written this introduction I have lost my body, my human frame: Kate Zambreno responds to the work of B. Ingrid Olson. | BOMB Magazine
- From French astronomer Camille Flammarion to will.i.am, a brief literary history of Mars. | The Millions
- “There are Austen action figures and bumper stickers, fatuous feuds with the Brontë camp, and outraged ladies compelled to defend Austen’s honor. . .” On the enduring appeal of Jane Austen. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- “More than form or even subject matter, sonics are my chief concern.” Talking to poet Marcus Wicker. | The Paris Review
- After a series of sexual assault allegations, the Swedish Academy may cancel the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. | The Guardian
Also on Literary Hub: Gabrielle Bellot on Embroideries, Marjane Satrapi’s early #MeToo novel · So much more than a Pulitzer Prize: Veronica Scott Esposito on Kendrick Lamar · A short story by YZ Chin, from the new collection Though I Get Home
