TODAY: In 1952, Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel is born.
- Even Seamus Heaney made mistakes: On poetry, Wordsworth, and misremembered locales. | Lit Hub
- “She makes the supernatural natural, the natural real and radiant.” James Lefenstey on Louise Erdich who salvages wisdom from absurdity and injustice. | Lit Hub
- Lynn Steger Strong talks to Brian Gresko about morning runs, the very weird alchemy of parenthood, and what it means to pay attention. | Lit Hub
- “I don’t take insults no matter what.” On the early career of Representative Maxine Waters, who shows no fear and plays no games. | Lit Hub Biography
- In early modern Europe, reading and writing meant getting your hands dirty. | Lit Hub History
- “Dorothy’s Mask.” Claire G. Coleman responds to Dorothy Porter’s novel-in-verse, The Monkey’s Mask, with a poem. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Cat Marnell’s How to Murder Your Life, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, and more rapid-fire book recs from Anbara Salam. | Book Marks
- Kit Frick looks at a new trend: the rise of the true crime podcast novel. | CrimeReads
- Rudolfo Anaya, a groundbreaking figure in Chicano literature, has died at 82. | NPR
- “Instead of celebrating myself, I’m going to celebrate the books by Black authors that came before me.” Candice Carty-Williams on being the first Black writer to win book of the year at the British Book Awards. | The Guardian
- Isabel Wilkerson on the American caste system that the country has never managed to undo. | The New York Times
- “I want to be Shakespeare and Tupac with a healthy relationship to women and violence.” Reginald Dwayne Betts on poetry, politics, and Black masculinity. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Naturalists and writers are collaborating on a literary field guide to the Pacific Northwest. | Haida Gwaii Observer
- Instead of reading the just-announced memoir by Clint Lorance, the soldier Trump pardoned after Lorance was convicted of murdering two Afghan civilians, read an account from the men in his platoon about the impact of his war crimes. | The Washington Post
- Hope Wabuke on racial violence and “the pain of the KKK joke.” | The Paris Review
Also on Lit Hub: Rural stories that get it right: a reading list • On the isolation of being deaf in prison • Read from Daphne Merkin’s new novel, 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love.
