TODAY: In 1966, Delmore Schwartz, poet and short story writer, dies. Saul Bellow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Humboldt’s Gift is based on Bellow’s relationship with Schwartz.
- Francisco Goldman visits the real America, where seven-year-olds translate Don Quixote. | Literary Hub
- When it comes to queer narratives, Brandon Taylor doesn’t really care what straight people think. | Literary Hub
- SO YOU’VE DECIDED TO WRITE: a new summer series on how to be a writer, from Terry McDonell. | Literary Hub
- Why E.B. White was wrong about (some of) the elements of style. | Literary Hub
- Why are we so unwilling to take Sylvia Plath at her word? | Literary Hub
- My businessman grandfather’s hidden literary past, from starting a west coast New Yorker to hanging out with William Saroyan. | Literary Hub
- Baillie Gifford Prize-winner Philippe Sands on the problem of evil and the birthplace of international justice. | Literary Hub
- The top ten best-reviewed fiction and nonfiction titles from the first half of the year. | Book Marks
- On an exhibit detailing Octavia Butler’s life story, drawn from “8,000 manuscripts, letters and photographs, and an additional 80 boxes of ephemera.” | NPR
- “He says that people form bonds at these places—but it’s not personal.” Short fiction by Lydia Davis. | New York Tyrant
- Barry Jenkins will direct an adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel, If Beale Street Could Talk. | Hollywood Reporter
- It’s because these portraits are messy that you feel like the women are talking to you: On Nell Dunn’s collection of transcribed conversations with her friends, Talking to Women. | The New Yorker
- The most recent issue of Poetry magazine—“a pause to assess the state of Asian American literature”—is now online. | Poetry Foundation
- The unexamined life is often entirely worth living: An excerpt from The Epiphany Machine by David Burr Gerrard. | Guernica
- “You should write whatever you want to write. Once you label it fiction, it’s fiction.” An interview with Rachel Khong. | The Riveter
Also on Lit Hub: Who will tell the stories of American fascism? · 5 Books Making News This Week: It Girls, infidelity, and illness · Read “The Well,” from Akhil Sharma’s new collection, A Life of Adventure and Delight.
