Lit Hub Daily: July 2, 2019

TODAY: In 1923, Wisława Szymborska, Polish poet, essayist, translator and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, is born.

This collection contains multitudes: celebrate Walt Whitman’s biennial with an exhibit of his life and works, on display at the Morgan Library. | Lit Hub
“Grief calls for muscles for which no fitness center has the right exercise machines.” On what you can find mushroom hunting in Central Park. | Lit Hub
“They are compelled to return, these revenants, some to watch, some to wait, some to want and want and not to have.” Mamta Chaudhry on five novels narrated by ghosts. | Lit Hub
When your White Whale is striped bass: Janet Messineo on the obsession that follows losing a big fish. | Lit Hub
A poem by Paisley Rekdal from Nightingale. | Lit Hub
5 Sci-Fi and Fantasy Beach Reads for July: feat. Chuck Wendig’s sleeping sickness saga, Helen Phillips’ eerie meditation on motherhood, and an anthology of lunar sci-fi. | Book Marks
From On The Waterfront to The Warriors, David Gordon recommends 12 films that depict the gritty realities of life in New York City. | CrimeReads
Neil Gaiman’s beloved comic Sandman is going to be a (very expensive) Netflix show. | The Hub
“I was struck, again, at how work can become such a yoke for a black man.” Edward P. Jones on rereading James Alan McPherson’s Hue and Cry. | The Paris Review
“I built the novel to be sturdy, to last.” Read an interview with Maurice Carlos Ruffin. | The Believer
“Her work is so consistently surprising that reading it is something like being confronted with a brilliant child, innocent in the sense of being uncorrupted by habit, instruction, or propriety.” Deborah Eisenberg on Natalia Ginzburg. | The New York Review of Books
50 years after Stonewall, Brown University’s John Hay Library has proven to be a shrine (and scholarly goldmine) to gay pulp fiction from the last half of the 20th century, boasting more than 5,000 paperbacks. | 90.9 WBUR
A new exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum reveals Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak’s interest in set design for opera and ballet. It includes some of the author’s sketches, storyboards and paintings. | Smithsonian
“All this Audenization of the Great Books relieves those books of the burden of being monuments and lets them breathe.” On the joys of teaching The Auden Course in Oklahoma. | The Hedgehog Review

Also on Lit Hub: Barbara Bourland on value and excess in the art market • Ten books you should read in July • Read a story by Brian Evenson from the current issue of Conjunctions.