- One year after Charlottesville: to better understand the terrible summer of 2017, Olivia Laing made the jump from nonfiction to novel. | Lit Hub
- Irish in America, trying to understand Irish-Americans: Maeve Higgins on immigration, whiteness, and pulling the ladder up behind you. | Lit Hub
- Because it’s Friday in August and wedding season never ends now: inside the weddings of 10 famous writers. | Lit Hub
- From This Mournable Body to Adam Tooze’s 10-year reflection on the financial crisis, the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- “What could be so villainous about stoic, silent, apple-cheeked people with dirt-floor cellars and no neighbors for miles?” Lori Rader-Day on the Midwest’s thriving crime writing scene. | CrimeReads
- A dozen authors invited to the Edinburgh book festival from the Middle East, Africa, and Belarus had their visas refused by the UK Home Office. | The Guardian
- “What I remember most of all is washing Leo Tolstoy’s ears.” Poet Ilya Kaminsky returns to Odessa decades after his deaf childhood there. | The New York Times
- “He slurps down eel stew and contemplates the void with mud-dwelling depressives.” Helen Rosner recommends Rachel Manija Brown’s Anthony Bourdain/Narnia fanfiction. | The New Yorker
- Who gets to claim Kafka? On Germany and Israel’s battle for the great writer’s legacy. | The Atlantic
- “Jean Genet would tell people, ‘She is crazy, ugly, cheap, and poor, but she has a lot of talent.’” On autofiction pioneer Violette Leduc. | The Paris Review
- “My dream announced, silently, its own meaninglessness, interpreting itself as unfit for interpretation.” Joshua Cohen on dreaming of a letterform that doesn’t exist. | Medium
- “The suicidal impulse, a sign he is at an impasse, would fade and intensify in a haunting pattern throughout Jimmy’s life.” Harmony Holiday on James Baldwin’s depression. | Poetry Foundation
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