TODAY: In 1954, British writer Hanif Kureishi is born.
- A conversation with the legendary Samuel Delany, part two: “If you going to write anything, take it seriously.” | Literary Hub
- Laura Ingalls Wilder and the greatest natural disaster in American history: when a trillion locusts ate everything in sight. | Literary Hub
- Why does everyone hate semicolons? On our love-hate relationship with punctuation. | Literary Hub
- Walking through Paris: The ghosts of literary greatness on every corner. | Literary Hub
- The fight for non-human rights: can an artist’s work bring justice to captive elephants? | Literary Hub
- Read new work by Ottessa Moshfegh, David Shields, Jamie Quatro and more in VICE’s 11th annual fiction issue. | VICE
- On the seriousness of Susan Sontag, who implored us to “cherish literature, relish films, challenge domination, release yourself into the rapture of sexual need—but be thorough about it.” | The New Yorker
- Jellyfish-buttermilk sorbet, nutrient gel, and spirulina ice cubes: On “The Next Meal,” an immersive culinary vision of our dystopian future as imagined by Alexandra Kleeman and chef Jen Monroe. | Atlas Obscura
- Sarah Gailey on Homer’s Sirens, Andersen’s little mermaid, and our pervasive cultural fear of the female voice. | Tor
- A series of recent bans and library shutdowns in Egypt have “turned something as simple as reading into a dangerous act.” | The Atlantic
- On Cat Power and the mythic appeal of bootleg recordings, which bring us “as close as possible to a point of origin.” | The Fanzine
- I think of this story as the wardrobe that opened into Narnia, the tornado that whirled me to Oz: Michael Sims on the formative experience of reading Sherlock Holmes. | Chapter 16
