TODAY: In 1931, novelist Rona Jaffe is born in Brooklyn.
- A rare look inside James Baldwin’s FBI file: “Mr. Hoover, if I had known this book was going to be published, I’d have thrown my body between the presses and stopped it.” | Literary Hub
- Julia Fierro discovers the dark secret of her childhood home. | Literary Hub
- 10 literary horror novels you should read. | Literary Hub
- “She has illuminated lives traditionally misrepresented as tragic.” Joan Didion’s 1979 review of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights. | Book Marks
- A unique bookstore in Blue Hill, Maine that operates on a business plan “modelled after ‘community-supported agriculture,’ commonly referred to by its initials, C.S.A.” | The New Yorker
- 50 years of loving, that most radical of acts: on the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision on Loving v. Virginia. | Literary Hub
- “[She] made pictures that grew out of and described the loneliness we are all taught to be ashamed of.” Hilton Als on Diane Arbus. | The New York Review of Books
- “Heaven’s only a sweet con to mollify and defer you, an excuse for why some days here get so painful.” Short fiction by Jill Crawford. | n+1
- A writer who was not at home in the world, but who still created work of arresting beauty: On Elizabeth Bishop. | The New Republic
- “If I’m going to fail I want that failure to be spectacular. I want it to be big.” An interview with Maaza Mengiste. | The Creative Independent
- How to annotate the world: can literary geo-tagging please be a thing? | Literary Hub
- “Her heart was a stolen purse; / her rhetoric an empty vicarage.” Britain’s poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy responds to the results of the UK General Election. | The Guardian
- From The Birth of the Pill to Pregnant Butch, 14 books on women’s reproductive rights to read after The Handmaid’s Tale. | Read it Forward
- File under empty mythologies: Nobody actually cared about Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech. | Literary Hub
And on Literary Hub: At the Bay Area Book Festival: when a literary festival gets political . . . • From wandering Australians to interspecies intrigue, 5 May books you might have missed • A first look at René Depestre’s new novel, Hadriana in All My Dreams
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