TODAY: In 1940, novelist, memoirist, and essayist Edmund White is born.
- “The nanny is a ripe literary opportunity to explore the depths of ownership and what it means to be part of the family.” Kiley Reid recommends five novels about caregivers. | Lit Hub
- Take another trip back to Neverland with outtakes from J.M. Barrie’s handwritten Peter Pan manuscript. | Lit Hub
- “She’d lived this grand life—a radical life—and she refused my line of questioning.” Heidi Sopinka talks to Claudia Dey about the impossibility of interviewing Leonora Carrington. | Lit Hub
- We don’t have to imagine it anymore: new fiction by Tommy Orange and Ben Walter, in the wake of climate collapse. | Lit Hub Climate Change
- All signs point to reading in the decade’s first Astrology Book Club. You can’t argue with science, people. | Lit Hub
- Lee Matalone on walking the thin line between truth and fiction when writing about family. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Wolf Hall, All My Puny Sorrows, King Lear, and more rapid-fire book recs from Ghost Wall author Sarah Moss. | Book Marks
- Katherine Ellison was a young reporter covering a murder trial when a mistake derailed her career, and the case became an obsession. | CrimeReads
- 52 books, 52 weeks: a writer is reading her way across the country to prepare for the 2020 election. (#goals) | LA Times
- Nigerian novelist Chukwuemeka Ike died Thursday at 88. | Sahara Reporters
- Pakistani officials raided a publishing house in Karachi and confiscated 250 copies of Mohammed Hanif’s novel A Case of Exploding Mangos, which satirizes the country’s late dictator Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. | NPR
- A prospective juror in the Weinstein trial apparently tweeted about the case to promote their “darkly funny new book.” | Vulture
- A recent grant from the Maryland State Library will fund the purchase of thousands of books for incarcerated people. | Baltimore Sun
- “Outsiders to the genre might not appreciate the power of a romance cover, but readers do.” On the making of a Harlequin cover. | Kirkus
- Worried about people knowing you poop? Try a fancy 18th century toilet designed to look like a giant book! | Atlas Obscura
Also on Lit Hub: What a forgotten novel can teach us about immigration in 2020 • Sam George-Allen on YouTube’s universe of make-up tutorials, and the male gaze • Read a story by Tommy Orange from McSweeney’s 58.
