TODAY: In 1915, Saul Bellow is born in Montreal, Quebec.
- In order to create the Ultimate Summer 2020 Reading List, we’ve ventured into unfamiliar territory and employed… math. | Lit Hub
- How JK Rowling betrayed the world she created: Gabrielle Bellot on growing up with the Harry Potter universe. | Lit Hub
- “The pace and frequency of Trump’s falsehoods can feel mind-numbing.” How The Washington Post tracks presidential lies. | Lit Hub Politics
- The radical afterlives of William Wordsworth: On the poet who inspired a generation of naturalists and artists. | Lit Hub History
- If you’re operating with a depleted attention span, pick up a short story collection—maybe one of these ten you may have missed last month? | Lit Hub
- Stan Cox on how Covid-19 puts workers across the food system—not just the meatpacking industry—in peril, and how we can build a more humane way of putting food on the table. | Lit Hub
- “If China couldn’t beat the West, it had to join the West.” Michael Schuman on President Deng Xiaoping’s trip to a Texas rodeo. | Lit Hub History
- ON THE VBC: Jericho Brown and Nikky Finney on Black Lives Matter and bearing witness • On Fiction/Non/Fiction Live, Curtis Sittenfeld talks feminism and fictionalized histories. | Lit Hub
- The Catcher in the Rye, Wuthering Heights, Wide Sargasso Sea, and more rapid-fire book recs from Practical Magic author Alice Hoffman. | Book Marks
- Olivia Rutigliano on Charles Dickens’ character Mr. Bucket, who embodied the author’s misgivings about the very police force he had once enthusiastically supported. | CrimeReads
- “His pitch was pure. There was no meanness in him. He understood, and conveyed, the grain of America.” Donna Tartt on Charles Portis. | The New York Times
- Ilhan Omar has written a rare, actually-good political memoir. | Jacobin
- Elena Ferrante’s next novel isn’t due in English for a few more months, but French readers recently got a hold of it. Many were impressed. | Yahoo
- At 94, Urdu poet Gulzar Dehalvi has recovered from the coronavirus. | Outlook India
- Expand your Pride Month reading list beyond U.S. borders with these eight queer books in translation. | Words Without Borders
- Black Portland writers recommend their favorite books on race. | The Oregonian
- Molly Crabapple on recent protests in New York City and why calling to defund the police is “hardly extreme.” | New York Review of Books
Also on Lit Hub: How Yusuf Idris’s stories upended respectability politics in Egypt • Domestic violence is a public health issue • Read an excerpt from Joyce Carol Oates’ new novel Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.
