TODAY: In 1923, Jaroslav Hašek, Czech author, pictured here with his wife Alexandra Grigorjevna Lvovova, who he married while still married to his first wife, Jarmila Mayerová, dies.
- “Watch closely. This is how Black writers live.” Toward an expanded canon of Black literature. | Lit Hub
- “All the people you could have been haunt the bookstore alongside the person you could still become.” On walking into a bookstore in your forties vs. your twenties. | Lit Hub
- An argument for the universal wearing of beards, courtesy Victorian tastemaker Thomas S. Gowing. | Lit Hub
- “I will finish for good, I pledged, by the anniversary of her death.” Honor Moore on finishing the book and conjuring her mother. | Lit Hub
- Biographer John Loughery on how a drug-addled art critic created the most elegant sleuth of the Jazz Age. | CrimeReads
- The enduring enigma of Jean Toomer, Joyce Carol Oates channels Margaret Atwood, and more Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
- Novels of sleepless nights, midnight poems, and a history of the bed: Marina Benjamin curates the ideal insomniac’s reading list. | The Guardian
- “Don’t call it a Dernaissance.” Sloane Crosley profiles the great Laura Dern. | Vanity Fair
- Aaron Sorkin’s To Kill a Mockingbird is a massive hit—and is now officially the highest single-week grossing American play in Broadway history. | Variety
- “A poem exists between pages of paper, bound by its own internal logic. A lyric arrives from the wider world, laden with decades of meaning and remembered melody”: when song lyrics become literature. | New Statesman
- In honor of the 20th anniversary of You’ve Got Mail, a Nora Ephron reading list. | Longreads
- “A pale imitation of our actual self”: What the Upanishads, ancient Sanskrit texts, tell us about avatars and virtual reality. | Aeon
- Edoardo Ballerini, the English language narrator of Knausgaard’s My Struggle, discusses the audiobook boom. | The Guardian
Also on Lit Hub: Sam Sanders on reading, race, and covering politics in America • Reading feminist futurism in the age of the “female” virtual assistant • Read a story from Sam Savage’s new collection, An Orphanage of Dreams
