TODAY: In 1972, Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, here pictured next to an alianthis tree outside her old house in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, dies. (Photo from the New York Daily News).
- The conversation I’ve been dreading: Ijeoma Oluo talks with her mom about race. | Literary Hub
- 10 iconic Brooklyn books that every New Yorker should read. | Literary Hub
- What is the language of American empire? Elaine Castillo on keeping untranslated words in her fiction. | Literary Hub
- “The job is nearly as much about asserting the importance of different genres, different voices, and different styles as it is about assessing the quality of a particular work.” Speaking with EW’s book critic, David Canfield. | Book Marks
- Rachel Kushner on Denis Johnson, a writer “who was much more serious than a cult phenomenon might ever suggest.” | Bookforum
- “Men, women: Let’s assume the female writer needn’t have lived out the narrative to write it.” Jamie Quatro’s response to readers asking what her husband thinks of her novel. | The Paris Review
- Don’t give up! That’s all I’m trying to say: Mira Jacob talks to her past self. | Shondaland
- “I’ve never had the slightest interest in writing a book to tell the life of a great man.” An interview with Robert Caro. | The New York Review of Books
- For nearly a decade we followed a dream of building a better Internet: The Awl has announced that it will cease publishing.| The Awl
- “People have been dispensing baby-rearing guidance in written form almost since the beginning of writing, and it is a storehouse of absurd advice.” Oliver Burkeman on the birth and transformation of the baby advice book boom. | The Guardian
- “The writing that holds real value for us very seldom comes into this world in a planned, tidy, rational way, as in a business plan, without disarray and confusion along the way.” On being a writer and making a living. | Slate
Also on Literary Hub: John Jeremiah Sullivan on craft: There’s no such thing as wasted writing · In conversation with the author of The Estrangement Principle, Ariel Goldberg · Read from Ana Simo’s novel, Heartland
