TODAY: In 1906, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is published.
- “I have worlds of things to tell you, and my pen is not swift enough to answer my purpose at all.” A glimpse inside the best summer of Emily Dickinson’s life. | Lit Hub
- Emily Temple watched 2oth-century bookstore classic You’ve Got Mail for the first time ever, and has VERY strong feelings about it. | Lit Hub Film
- “Writing was my degree in addiction studies.” Claire Pooley on what it meant to write her way up from rock bottom. | Lit Hub
- Some life advice from Rye Curtis: maybe be a little less like Satan and more like my mom. | Lit Hub
- Mahogany L. Browne on Audre Lorde, tools for liberation, and Black writers as agents of change. | Lit Hub Politics
- “That story about romantic love versus obligation has been in my bones forever.” Mark Rader in conversation with Lori Feathers. | Lit Hub
- Terry Williams gives us a brief history of after-hours clubs. | CrimeReads
- A look back at John Steinbeck’s five most iconic works, from Of Mice and Men to East of Eden. | Book Marks
- “The immigrant’s first real introduction to surviving in English is profanity.” Cathy Park Hong on “bad” English as heritage. | Buzzfeed News
- Many of Elizabeth Bishop’s letters have “a mood of mild, amused conspiracy,” writes Langdon Hammer. | New York Review of Books
- Ketab Lwast, or Read Books, is coordinating with village elders in rural Afghanistan and using social media to organize a mobile library for kids in remote towns. | American Libraries Magazine
- Piecing together the fragments of Lorraine Hansberry’s personal life, from her words and the words of those who knew her. | Autostraddle
- A new literary anthology focuses on the lives of black women in Pittsburgh, a city where health outcomes and economic opportunities for black women don’t hold up well in comparison to the rest of the country. | 90.5 WESA
- Though the circumstances around Edgar Allan Poe’s death are mysterious, some have suggested suicide. A new scholarly study used computational analysis of Poe’s work to argue against that theory. | Study Finds
- With “the grim final chapter of Cromwell’s story,” literary icon Hilary Mantel is back. | The New York Times
Also on Lit Hub: “At the Shore”: from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Frank Bidart • Read an excerpt from Ray Loriga’s newly-translated novel Surrender (trans. Carolina de Robertis).
