TODAY: In 1292, Persian Sufi poet Sheikh Saadi dies.
- “I personally know the author of this story you’re reading.” Oh look, a new story by Rachel Kushner. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Finding your craft: Wright Thompson on bourbon, books, and writing your way out of small-town America. | Lit Hub Memoir
- “He ripped his shirt open, revealing the bloody tooth, proclaimed how much he loved her, and asked for her hand.” Unsurprisingly this proposal, from Kurt Vonnegut to his eventual wife Jane, didn’t work. (Second time did!) | Lit Hub Biography
- “It was the song playing at every house party that year, pumping out of every car and boom box.” Big Freedia on the song that started it all. | Lit Hub Music
- Robert Kaufman and Philip Gerard on the texture of language, poetics, and linguistic dispossession in translating Jean Daive. | Lit Hub Translation
- “The war on drugs is also a war on the poor, and the addicted, and the mentally ill.” Chris Dennis on his struggling with drugs, and life in prison. | Lit Hub Memoir
- “One night, Frehley damaged his kisser in a drunken car wreck, which led to a compromised photo shoot, resulting in pictures of his half-made-up face in profile.” Can you imagine KISS in the Instagram era? | Lit Hub Music
- Molly Odintz on a new wave of fictional vigilantes seeking justice for the oppressed. | CrimeReads
- “Scholars have known about this correspondence since Hale donated Eliot’s letters to Princeton, in 1956, but for decades, the trove of documents remained a tantalizing secret—kept sealed, at Eliot’s insistence, until fifty years after both he and Hale had died.” On the secret history of T. S. Eliot’s muse, Emily Hale. | The New Yorker
- “We know nothing. Not much, at any rate.” Read Judith Schalansky on Sappho, in an excerpt from An Inventory of Losses. | The Paris Review
- The 2020 Bad Sex Awards have been officially cancelled, because we’ve already been subjected to way too much bad stuff this year. | The Guardian
- “This is bourgeois anguish: terrible, but elegantly situated.” Rachel Vorona Cote on history, politics, and particulars of the Victorian parlor. | Jezebel
- Alexander Chee on how he’s overcome writer’s block. | Medium
- The story of iconic New York City musical theatre bar Marie’s Crisis, which “has borne witness to much of New York’s modern history,” as it faces down the pandemic. | Guernica
- “I think this book has been emancipatory.” Karla Cornejo Villavicencio on immigration and writing The Undocumented Americans. | Los Angeles Times
