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TODAY: In 1974, Colum McCann’s novel Let the Great World Spin takes place.
- “Primero las lágrimas y después el coraje. I say this because we are Americans, meaning we try to embody the best of that ideal, meaning we won’t turn away from injustice. Punto.” Oscar Villalon on the shootings in El Paso. | Lit Hub
- “[He] was far more deeply and intimately engaged with contemporary American history than anyone has thought.” On the novel F. Scott Fitzgerald never wrote. | Lit Hub
- “Loud, lewd, cheating, smoking, bisexual degenerate…” Amanda Lee Koe on her teenage role model, Marlene Dietrich. | Lit Hub
- InterLibrary Loan will change your life: Nick Ripatrazone offers a brief history of the apex of human civilization. | Lit Hub
- “Why are we in the West so deeply uncomfortable with and?” Tope Folarin on the misguided urge to carve the world into binaries. | Lit Hub
- Isolation, self-exploitation, low wages: Steve Greenhouse on the false freedom of the perilous gig economy. | Lit Hub
- Elliott Holt revisits Alison Lurie’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Foreign Affairs, and reflects on the enduring appeal of expat lit. | Lit Hub
- This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Booklist‘s Donna Seaman on Virginia Woolf, George Orwell and reading to be enthralled. | Book Marks
- Curtis Evans revisits Anna Katharine Green’s The Leavenworth Case, the most popular mystery novel you’ve never heard of. | CrimeReads
- “He has to resist the lure of the adventure story. He has to resist the lure of the cowboy. He has to resist the lure of the savior.” Jesmyn Ward profiles Ta-Nehisi Coates. | Vanity Fair
- PEN America members, from Margaret Atwood to Elif Shafak, pay tribute to Toni Morrison; Hannah Giorgis on Morrison’s “kaleidoscopic vision of literature”; revisit Hilton Als’ 2003 profile of Morrison, whom he calls “both mother and father to black writers of my generation.” | PEN America, The Atlantic, The New Yorker
- “Her books never lose sight of the individual within the whole, and the reader is always aware of the swirl of factors—geographic, biological, spiritual, historical—that have added up to bring her characters their fates.” Gabe Habash on Olga Tokarczuk. | Publishers Weekly
- Hillary and Chelsea Clinton are writing a book together, called The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience. | The Hill
- “We deserve a larger space for expression so we can examine our interior lives without the gaze of others.” Well-Read Black Girl’s founder Glory Edim on Black literature’s place in American history. | CJR
- Read a profile of the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning sci-fi master Samuel Delany. | Public Books
- A Cleveland-based urban planner, Kauser Razvi, created the Literary Lots program, which converts vacant spaces into scenes from children’s books. | ABC News
Also on Lit Hub: Reading Women on the literature of chronic illness and mental health • On Otherppl, Sarah Rose Etter on the unintended grotesque of her debut novel • 5 books you may have missed in July • The origins and impact of the Book Industry Charitable Foundation • Read an excerpt from Javier Marías’ novel Berta Isla (tr. Margaret Jull Costa).
