TODAY: In 1922, Helen Gurley Brown, the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine for 32 years and author of the 1962 bestseller Sex and the Single Girl, is born.
- Kristin Iversen profiles Patricia Lockwood, writer of crystalline sentences, really good tweets, and a new novel about much more than the internet. | Lit Hub
- Yemisi Adegoke grapples with what it means to be a “returnee” to Lagos, after growing up in the UK. | Lit Hub Memoir
- “Am I prepared? Is anyone, ever?” Oncology nurse Nina Solis reflects on turning to Mary Oliver as she watches her first patient die. | Lit Hub
- Where is all the housing anxiety in contemporary fiction? Laura Maw on new books that illuminate what it means to be a tenant, by Megan Hunter and Daisy Johnson. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Daniel Elkind revisits the best war novel you’ve never heard of—James Chapman’s GLASS. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Liz Heinecke on that time Marie Curie was almost excluded from winning the Nobel Prize because of—you guessed it—misogyny. | Lit Hub
- History“We are now living, belatedly, in the age of Tartt.” Amy Gentry on the new wave of dark academic thrillers. | CrimeReads
- “Marriage made me an antisocial person, while divorce made me open-hearted.” Haley Mlotek talks to Torrey Peters and Ethan Philbrick about divorce art. | Jewish Currents
- Read a new short story by Lily King. | O Magazine
- “I wrote a book about disability in which the word ‘disability’ appears only once. That was a mistake.” Sandra Beasley embraces the medicalized body. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Merve Emre on Patricia Lockwood’s debut novel, Bill McKibben on Bill Gates’s climate change road map, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
- “The pandemic has made us all stand still and face our own brand of bullshit.” Tiana Clark on writing through a global pandemic. | Poets & Writers
- Rebecca Onion explores the lasting appeal of Louise Bates Ames’s parenting books, which “help you to feel like you’re not living in the upside-down.” | Slate
- “An erasure of memory is part of how the United States constructs its national identity.” Laila Lalami on American mythology and citizenship. | LARB
- How did the owners of Hobby Lobby get involved in “one of the largest frauds in the history of religious artifacts”? | Harper’s
