- “Every time Iraq began to unravel, it was women who worked the hardest to stitch it back together.” Lessons from a decade reporting on women during the Iraq War. | Lit Hub
- On teaching a high school class in trauma literature: Kate McQuade on the work of Yaa Gyasi, Art Spiegelman, Tim O’Brien, and more. | Lit Hub
- “Living outside the borders of traditional society typically involves some kind of exploitation.” On the Oneida experiment and other failed utopias. | Lit Hub
- The painter’s wife vs. the poet’s husband: Shawna Lemay on the indistinct line between background and foreground. | Lit Hub
- “That year of reading was a year of transformation.” An essay about sex, pulp fiction, and Mary Ruefle. | Lit Hub
- Derek Milman looks at how North by Northwest’s cinematic set-pieces and much-abused gray suit changed action movies forever. | CrimeReads
- The nine meanest cats in literature: from the Cheshire Cat to Behemoth, Macavity to Mrs. Norris. | Book Marks
- Jess Row recommends three books and two films about white flight, from Middlesex to The Last Black Man in San Francisco. | Book Marks
- “Fat is fine. Honestly, it’s my favorite part, proof of a man who wants and wants.” Read a short story by Kimberly King Parsons. | New York Tyrant
- On journalist Janet Flanner, whose “high class gossip” changed America. | JSTOR
- “I tend to bristle at what feels like the suggestion that the sex in my writing must be the point.” Kristen Roupenian on Mary Gaitskill and the trouble with writing about sex. | The Guardian
- Some (small) comfort for broke novelists: despite being a best-selling author, Jane Austen didn’t make a lot of money from her writing either. | Jezebel
- “White nationalism applies fantastical details to historical source material but forgets that it is fiction.” How white nationalists co-opt fan fiction. | Wired
- The Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, may soon be writing a children’s book inspired by her pet dogs, Guy and Bogart. | Harper’s Bazaar
- A look into the mysterious life of Anne Lock, the 16th-century Calvinist who was the first English poet to publish a sonnet cycle. | The New Yorker
Also on Lit Hub: Literary Disco talks Jurassic Park • Gov. Terry McAuliffe on white nationalism and the lessons of Charlottesville • How the long persecution of the Rhineland Jews shaped Karl Marx • Read a story from Peter Orner’s collection Maggie Brown & Others.
