TODAY: In 1906, Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom John Betjeman, who described himself in Who’s Who as a “poet and hack,” dies.
- “I walked into my beautiful new apartment, and I thought: I now have a room of my own.” Heather O’Neill on reading Virginia Woolf and looking back at her younger selves. | Lit Hub
- Bask in some welcome beauty with the best book covers of August. | Lit Hub Design
- The making of the Ronald Reagan Generation: Rick Perlstein on the 176-page plan to sell a new kind of conservatism to America. | Lit Hub Politics
- “I am drawn into Shōnagon’s world, seduced by her boldness, her love of details.” Eric Weiner learns to appreciate the small things from a 500-year-old Japanese writer. | Lit Hub Criticism
- On the brink of war: Charles J. Hanley gives a view of the Cold War rivalry of North and South Korea in 1950. | Lit Hub History
- Jill Sisson Quinn on the strange allure of Lake Michigan. (Which thinks it’s still an ocean! Lol.) | Lit Hub Nature
- Carlos Fonseca on harnessing the unlikely literary power of tedium: a conversation with Juan Toledo. | Lit Hub Criticism
- “Prayer to the Redwood.” A poem by Mai Der Vang. | Lit Hub Poetry
- The CrimeReads editors recommend August’s best true crime releases, plus one essential new work of criticism. | CrimeReads
- Ali Smith’s Summer, Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights, Daisy Johnson’s Sisters, and Carl Hiaasen’s Squeeze Me all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
- “Do you feel like you’re living in your own novel?” Thoughts on lockdown and the pandemic from the author of a novel set during the bubonic plague. | Slate
- “Why weren’t you taking the Black people who wrote these books seriously when they first told you what they were experiencing, when they first shared their art with you?”: A profile of Yaa Gyasi, whose second novel comes out this fall. | Entertainment Weekly
- Annie Ernaux on #MeToo, the contemporary French literary scene, and more. | Financial Times
- What Allen Ginsberg’s journals tell us about his reactions to the Vietnam War. | The Paris Review
- Busy botanicals, saturated abstractions, a lone bird: Here’s what’s going on with book cover art right now. | Washington Post
- Alexander Chee writes about his grandfather’s memories of the decades-long Japanese occupation of Korea. | The New York Times Magazine
- “It would be a decade before a woman as complex as Silla appeared again in African American Literature; that woman would be Toni Morrison’s eponymous antagonist Sula.” Remembering Paule Marshall, a year after her death. | Entropy
Also on Lit Hub: But you don’t look trans: A tale of microagression • “Boccaccio: The Plague Years”: A poem by Rita Dove • Read an excerpt from Daisy Johnson’s new novel Sisters.
