TODAY: In 1956, Iris Murdoch and John Bayley marry at the Oxford register office.
- An inquiry into the reasons why beauty gets wasted in this country: Read a 1970 review of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. | Book Marks
- The 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel was awarded to N. K. Jemisin for The Obelisk Gate; other winners include Ursula K. Le Guin, Amal El-Mohtar, and Seanan McGuire. | The Hugo Awards
- “It is hard enough to be honest with ourselves about death, and exponentially more so with kids.” On books that teach children about grief and dying. | The New Yorker
- The only dividing wall in A Little Life author Hanya Yanigahara’s apartment is “a vast, double-sided bookshelf containing more than 12,000 titles.” | The Guardian
- John Banville on the concluding volume of Reiner Stach’s Franz Kafka study, “one of the great literary biographies of our time—indeed, of any time.” | The New York Review of Books
- Two longtime employees at Denver’s Tattered Cover Bookstore have opened a live-in library in a formerly abandoned Colorado Ranch. | National Trust for Historic Preservation
- “Even now my writing desk is full of old wads of Juicy Fruit, which with their gray hemispherical shape and many little indentations resemble shrunken brains.” Karl Ove Knausgaard on gum. | The New York Times Magazine
- “The pirate business was mostly theoretical. Performance art as much as anything.” Short fiction by Danielle Evans. | BuzzFeed Reader
