TODAY: In 2015, The Day of the Jackal author Frederick Forsyth reveals that he worked for MI6 for more than 20 years.
- Deborah Eisenberg’s conversation with Paul Holdengraber might convince you to try writing in front of a brick wall. | Lit Hub
- Sharmila Sen on wearing “the mask that grins” as a brown woman, and the courage that anger requires. | Lit Hub
- Whether your back-to-school vibe is “incorrigible stalker,” “aspirational lit-cult member,” or something in between, we have the perfect campus novel recommendation for you. | Lit Hub
- From Jewel to Jimmy Carter, Alicia Keys to Ally Sheedy, how 10 celebrity poetry collections were reviewed. | Book Marks
- Do incarcerated people have access to crime novels? Time to take a look at the arbitrary, ridiculous world of prison censorship and answer this question once and for all. | CrimeReads
- “We now have questions about love that Romeo and Juliet can’t answer.” On the pleasures and promises of the science-fiction-romance genre. | WIRED
- From a 47 acre garbage dump in California to Minnesota’s Mall of America, Amanda Petrusich on the oddball residencies where artists and writers can flee the stifling of our era. | The New Yorker
- “The night is beautiful beyond thought.” On the Alaskan Island that inspired Rockwell Kent’s forgotten classic of nature writing. | Atlas Obscura
- “Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, I didn’t have many models or representations of Asian Americans expressing something as simple as happiness.” Poets Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Ross Gay in conversation. | Asian American Writers Workshop
- True crime, surreal short stories, a memoir of adoption, and much more: 21 books to look out for this fall. | NYLON
- “The idea of paying people just for being alive is now one that both a radical scholar and a reasonable Beltway journalist can take seriously.” On two very different new books that endorse the possibility of a Universal Basic Income, or UBI. | The New Republic
- “All of it’s true, whether or not it actually occurred.” Read an interview with Mitchell S. Jackson. | VQR
Also on Lit Hub: Javier Marias on the pain of the slow schism in a friendship • Five novels on womanhood, by women • From Claudia Dey’s Heartbreaker
