TODAY: In 1950, Jim Carroll, poet and punk musician best known for his 1978 book, The Basketball Diaries, is born.
- RIP the great American playwright: Sam Shepard, who died yesterday at age 73, on his long writing life. | Literary Hub
- 14 books you should read this August. | Literary Hub
- Too big not to fail: Paul Kingsnorth on the inevitable collapse of civilization. | Literary Hub
- Spy fiction is the real futurism: how novels by former agents predicted this mess. | Literary Hub
- “Sounds like a gimmick, right?” A 1999 review of Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem’s hard-boiled tale of a detective with Tourette’s syndrome. | Book Marks
- Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actor, author, and director Sam Shepard has died. | Broadway World
- He was forty-four years old, trapped in his body: Short fiction by Don DeLillo. | The New Yorker
- My correspondence with a notoriously grumpy poet. | Literary Hub
- “Richard Wright was not wrong about her importance: She has served her readers across a century.” Claudia Rankine on two new books celebrating the legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks. | The New York Times
- “My work is about a time when I did fuck a lot of people, and, I guess, people are interested in that.” An interview with the famously reclusive Eve Babitz. | VICE
- Duke Ellington really just wanted to be a writer: on the literary sensibility of an American great. | Literary Hub
- Joshua Cohen on the closing of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and the election of Donald Trump. | The Point
- On the travels and writing of Penelope Fitzgerald, “a keen consumer of the package holiday.” | Granta
- 5 books making news this week: politics, poets, and performers. | Literary Hub
- PBS has announced an eight-episode documentary series that will explore the place of reading in American culture entitled The Great American Read. | Publishers Weekly
- The day Antoine de Saint-Exupéry disappeared. | Literary Hub
And on Literary Hub: Is your novel fiction or non? On the messy notion of truth in writing • Why short stories? Jim Shepard has some answers • Read “The Bones of Louella Brown” by Ann Petry
