TODAY: In 1935, Allen Lane founds Penguin Books, producing the first mass-market paperbacks.
- Gregory Pardlo writes a letter to Juneteenth: “You are a brick in the historical foundation upon which our country might reimagine its collective future.” | Lit Hub Politics
- From beautiful to menacing: Feast your eyes on the best book covers of July. | Lit Hub
- In utero reviews: artist Kate Gavino’s unborn baby has some strong opinions about classic literature. | Lit Hub
- Endless war, social upheaval, and a White House unleashing violence on protestors: Lawrence Roberts on the 1971 May Day protests. | Lit Hub History
- Navigating pandemic life in the San Francisco: a graphic news story from Mission Local. | Lit Hub Politics
- Lisa Levenstein revisits 1995’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, the birthplace of “the infrastructure for what would become online feminism.” | Lit Hub History
- ON THE VBC: The Antibody Reading Series, starring Porochista Khakpour, Meredith Talusan, and Justin Taylor. | Lit Hub
- Patrick Radden Keefe considers the power—and the responsibility—of true crime writing. | CrimeReads
- Parul Sehgal on Yiyun Li, Stephen King on Lauren Beukes, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
- A month of literary listening: AudioFile’s best audiobooks of July. | Book Marks
- Beyond Oprah: On the Noname Book Club and other popular Black book clubs taking reading to the next level. | The New York Times
- “This is what Acker is performing. What is a book? Is this a book? What makes a text legible or illegible?” Kate Zambreno on Kathy Acker. | Affidavit
- Will our relationship to time—the changes it does and does not bring—define memories of this pandemic? Zadie Smith’s new essay collection offers a hint. | British Vogue
- “Williams’s book only succeeds in underscoring just how un-universal his experience has been.” Ryu Spaeth on race, identity politics, and Thomas Chatterton Williams. | The New Republic
- Caryl Phillips on Derek Walcott’s life, work, and reckoning with West Indian identity in 1950s New York. | New York Review of Books
- “Going through my many boxes, I am no longer the plaything of forces beyond my control. I have, to use a vogue term, agency.” Michael Dirda on cleaning out his book collection. | Washington Post
- Sophie Mackintosh and Avni Doshi discuss mothers, mothering, motherhood and more. | Granta
Also on Lit Hub: A new generation of writers in Bosnia and Herzegovina narrates life beyond war • “Stag Hunt”: A poem by Brooke Horvath • Read a story from Jayant Kaikini’s collection No Presents Please, trans. by Tejaswini Niranjana.
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