TODAY: In 1995, Michael Ende, best known for his epic fantasy The Neverending Story, dies.
- When the swamp won’t drain and the fires rage on: Rebecca Solnit on why the President must be impeached. | Lit Hub
- Just how expensive can the writing life be? Melissa Chadburn on the hidden costs being a writer. | Lit Hub
- From Barbara Pym to Barbara Comyns, Patrick DeWitt recommends his favorite mid-century commonwealth writers (some of whom may not be named Barbara). | Lit Hub
- As New York City cooks in its own steamy soup, please enjoy these novels of the city’s inevitable apocalyptic destruction. | Lit Hub
- “It’s about valuing love, care, and decency above the rule of the state.” Olivia Laing recommends 5 books about love during the apocalypse. | Book Marks
- The best narrative nonfiction true crime books by journalists, for those who like their facts straight and their sentences twisty. | CrimeReads
- “What’s really amazing about that place is that it’s darker than anything could ever be. So dark that when you turn off the flashlight it feels like you can grab the darkness with your hands.” Read “The Wind Cave,” a new short story by Haruki Murakami. | The New Yorker
- Someone did the math on the NYT’s “By the Book” columns—turns out we we were all right, and male authors recommend books by other men four times as often as they do books by women. | Bustle
- “I soon flung it away: ‘Another celebrity writer being cute about cats!’” Vivian Gornick on adopting kittens and changing her mind about Doris Lessing’s surprising book Particularly Cats. | The New York Review of Books
- “The world dismisses girls, stories and the imagination. I do not.” An interview with Samantha Hunt. | Electric Literature
- Unknown Pleasures, the iconic Joy Divison album (and t-shirt design), has found new life as an anthology of short stories, one for each of its 10 tracks. | The Guardian
- “This is why reading is over. None of my friends like it. Nobody wants to do it anymore.” Read an excerpt from David L. Ulin’s The Lost Art of Reading. | The Paris Review
- “Almost all of the romance novels I have read achieve something that sounds mundane, but remains quite radical: they model a form of female happiness and fulfillment still lacking in most canonical works of literature.” The consolation and pleasure of reading romance novels. | LARB
