TODAY: In 1972, poet John Berryman dies.
- “Like criticism, [praise] makes us forget what art is for.” Toward changing the language of creative writing classrooms. | Lit Hub
- How Zora Neale Hurston (born on this day in 1891) helped create the first realistic black baby doll. | Lit Hub
- “In imagining the future, writers use food as a symbol not only of hope, but of death, environmental warning, and class.” What eating in sci-fi says about the real world. | Lit Hub
- “I wondered what was being lost, or distorted, through the process of my translation.” Jamil Jan Kochai on traditions of Afghan oral storytelling. | Lit Hub
- From Ragtime to The March, classic reviews of E. L. Doctorow’s most iconic novels. | Book Marks
- “The conspiracy theory as a form has been weaponized, and it is now very hard not to question its function, and its usefulness, in fiction.” Or: whence conspiracy fiction under a conspiracy president? | Vulture
- “Hitchcock pretends du Maurier wasn’t a great influence on him. But she was. She taught him about suspense.” On the enduring influence of Daphne du Maurier. | Five Books
- 22 writers on how to read more, from taking your coffee with a book to keeping a big old literary spreadsheet. | Refinery29
- Attention literary girls who know how to make flower crowns: Nabokov superfan Lana Del Rey has finished writing a book of poetry, which may or may not be called Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass. | LA Times
- “I wonder about the term postcolonial. Is colonialism really post-?” Read an interview with Arundhati Roy. | Boston Review
- You might think you like books—but do you like them as much as this guy, who owns 10,000 of them? | NPR
Also on Lit Hub: Who owns the term “intersectionality”? • Two poems by Marwa Helal • Read from Old Newgate Hill
