TODAY: In 1957, 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers is born.
- “You get to the point where there is no God, no past, no future, just now and the next millisecond.” Robert Macfarlane on deep water cave-diving and the lure of the void. | Lit Hub
- “Her only real crime was that she was a better poet than me.” On the lessons of a writing nemesis. | Lit Hub
- Anne Sexton, networking legend: Joy Lanzendorfer on what the poet taught her about self-promotion. | Lit Hub
- When Franz Kafka woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a brand: on the Kafkaesque feeling of Kafka tourism in Prague. | Lit Hub
- “That the film shifts focus from Scout to a male authority figure, no matter how holy he seems, is a critical error.” How Gregory Peck made To Kill a Mockingbird all about Atticus. | Lit Hub
- Lewis Hyde on the intoxicating power of forgetting where you came from. | Lit Hub
- Dual Citizens author Alix Ohlin recommends five great novels about sisters, from Sense and Sensibility to We Have Always Lived in the Castle. | Book Marks
- “Of course, Pat Buchanan, Rep. Henry Hyde, and the Rev. Pat Robertson have never missed a period and yet they have much in mind for young women who have done so.” Read an unpublished op-ed on abortion by Elizabeth Hardwick. | NYRB
- “A more just ending would have involved Edna drowning any of those men in the Gulf—maybe all of them—and then going to take a well-deserved swim.” Carmen Maria Machado on rereading The Awakening as an adult. | The Paris Review
- “Reality is so relentless and so superficial that a sustained act of imagination is radical.” Taffy Brodesser-Akner and Tom Perrotta in conversation. | Vulture
- “[The Riggios] seem to know the difference between money, which one spends, and wealth, which one wields.” The strange story of a secret literary fellowship funded by Barnes & Noble’s chairman. | The New Yorker
- Grammatical mishaps and spelling faux pas: 19 linguistic controversies that split opinions and snowballed into political conflict. | The Guardian
- Read about the Washington researchers whose three-decade long quest to document local fish led to the discovery of dozens of species and an illustrated, 1,032-page tome. | Crosscut
- “We were told we were hysterical. We were told that our books are crap and that’s why no one reviews them. Then someone started counting.” Jennifer Weiner on “women’s literature” and telling big stories. | Salon
Also on Lit Hub: The Nigerian writers salvaging tradition from colonial erasure • How did a language in Papua, New Guinea disappear? • Read from Mark Haddon’s new novel The Porpoise.
