TODAY: In 1894, humorist James Thurber is born.
- “The quiet, incantatory power of her voice and the bravado of her poem got me.” Jessica Hagedorn on her “brainy, arty, fabulous” friend, Thulani Davis. | Lit Hub
- “Iceland was a force, a force that had taken possession of me.” On the undeniable appeal of a tiny, cold, beautiful island in the North Atlantic. | Lit Hub Travel
- “In walking through dead writers’ houses, we understand that time and space do not coalesce.” Phoebe Hamilton-Jones on the particular thrill of literary tourism. | Lit Hub Travel
- “Nearly every second male profile lists Kurt Vonnegut as its favorite writer.” On the dead male writers of Tinder, and what they mean for your romantic prospects. | Lit Hub
- “Whiteness is not able to admit the lie at its root: it’s a fiction that only exists as a function of what it excludes.” Shya Scanlon on Claudia Rankine’s masterful trilogy on whiteness in America. | Lit Hub Politics
- Journaling and walking, Paris and Montreal: Nicole Brossard on the impossibility of saying everything. | Lit Hub
- “It’s impossible to ignore how Black Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook have heightened a sense of community, connectivity, and solidarity.” On being a Black American ex-pat looking for community in London. | Lit Hub
- The Opium Prince author Jasmine Aimaq recommends five books about the “real” Afghanistan. | Book Marks
- Crime by committee: Kia Abdullah recommends eight novels featuring group misdeeds. | CrimeReads
- “The way forward isn’t to pursue a dream of staying within our lanes. . . The only way forward is for those of us who are not among the one percent to make common cause in order to put an end to these inequities.” On the politics of cultural appropriation. | Dissent
- Why Tomorrow Will Be Better, Betty Smith’s forgotten follow up to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, deserves reconsideration. | The Washington Post
- Ian Frazier on Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Steinberg, Route 66, and the feeling of rereading Lolita, “an American masterpiece of the atrocious-hilarious.” | The New Yorker
- “It isn’t to master an art that I have no desire to master, but, evidently, to create something out of my perplexity with the form.” Amit Chaudhuri on why he writes novels. | n+1
- What even is quarantine culture? E. Alex Jung breaks it down. | Vulture
- Olga Tokarczuk’s translators talk about world literature, the influence of style on translation, and how they heard about Tokarczuk’s Nobel Prize. | Los Angeles Review of Books
