TODAY: In 1896, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, American author who lived in and wrote about rural Florida, is born.
- So, it turns out The Wind in the Willows isn’t really a children’s book.(BONUS FACT: the word “willow” appears nowhere in its pages.) | Lit Hub
- BREAKING: Shirley Jackson, possibly a witch, definitely played the zither. | Lit Hub
- What does immersing yourself in a book do to your brain? | Lit Hub
- “I like to joke that getting into the business was like pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz.” An interview with book critic Bridey Heing. | Book Marks
- From France to Iceland to Japan and France again, August’s best international crime fiction for the discerning armchair traveler. | CrimeReads
- On the perils of being a librarian in the Victorian era—which were bad enough to necessitate “a seaside rest home for those who had broken down in library service.” Which is obviously the dream. | JSTOR
- “I tend to move towards things that feel like too much to say or too embarrassing to say. Then I want to say it.” An interview with Catherine Lacey. | Hazlitt
- Carey Polis recommends a series of travel books that go away beyond the “look-I-ate-somewhere-cool-now-I’m-going-to-wax-way-too-poetic” genre. | Bon Appetit
- For all you literary introverts, Hernán Díaz rounds up 11 books on isolation and loneliness. | Electric Literature
- Deborah Eisenberg on a new documentary about a cache of lost silent films—and also “the eternal, macabre romance between life and death, generation and devastation, the abiding and the evanescent.” | New York Review of Books
- 17 years after its publication, Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto has finally been adapted for the big screen. Here’s the first trailer. | Slate
- “In the book, I never call it absence, nor desertion, nor neglect. I use the words distance and loss.” Cinelle Barnes on her father. | Catapult
