TODAY: In 1934, children’s book author Virginia Hamilton is born.
- “No editing for the writer, no sense for the reader.” Our resident Kerouac skeptic close-reads his “Belief & Techniques for Modern Prose.” | Lit Hub
- “We had better pay careful attention to the emotional background we share with our fellow travelers on this planet.” Frans de Waal on what we know (and don’t know) about animals’ emotions. | Lit Hub
- “As landscape without our image recedes, the wilds only deepen in their strangeness.” Bruce Berger on the dreamlike experience of the wilderness. | Lit Hub
- How do you talk to your patients about death? Doctor Sunita Puri recalls her first days in palliative care. | Lit Hub
- The story of a meeting with Stanley Adelman, New York’s typewriter magician. | Lit Hub
- “If you’re not in love with words why are you writing?” Storytelling tips from the writer of Blade Runner. | Lit Hub
- When the eeriness of trauma can only be understood through fiction: on the healing buffer of “not exactly.” | Lit Hub
- Great American Desert author Terese Svoboda recommends five books about the prairie, from William Gass’ In the Heart of the Heart of the Country to Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. | Book Marks
- Fran Dorricott recommends 9 thrillers richly infused with atmosphere, from The Secret History to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. | CrimeReads
- “A line of golden sparks shoots upward into the sky and ends in a colored point: first pink, then blue, then pink again, casting its brief hypnotic light on the sand and the water.” Read a new short story by Sally Rooney. | The New Yorker
- Wish more ghosts scratched at your windows? (And have an extra $1.62m collecting dust somewhere?) The house that inspired Wuthering Heights is for sale. | Lonely Planet
- Joni Mitchell’s hand-drawn 1971 book of poems, lyrics, and illustrations, originally created for her best friends, will be published for all of us this fall. | The Guardian
- “It’s often possible to make demands of a child that couldn’t be made of an adult.” On the “creepy authoritarianism” of Madeleine L’Engle. | The Paris Review
- “Not one syllable of what Hemingway has written can or will be missed by any literate person in the world.” The Times offers a light retraction of some of their classic book pans. | The New York Times
- What might the maps of Middle Earth on Amazon Prime Video tell us about the upcoming Lord of the Rings TV series? | Vulture
- “Artists were expected to hew strictly to socialist realism”: On anti-censorship and dissident Czech literature. | Electric Literature
Also on Lit Hub: Kathryn Davis, T Kira Madden, and more take the Lit Hub Questionnaire • Waiting for the day that characters don’t default to whiteness • Read a story from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s collection, Minutes of Glory
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