TODAY: In 1986, novelist and short story writer Bernard Malamud dies.
- W.S. Merwin, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and translator, died Friday at 91. | Lit Hub
- “It hurts like hell, but it is not all finished in the West.” On reading Barry Lopez through a long Montana winter. | Lit Hub
- “The children never get the attention they deserve, because the Updike-like heroes need so much.” Thomas E. Ricks on life in an Updike novel. | Lit Hub
- Samuel Beckett really knew how to throw shade: from Frederic Pajak’s memoir, Uncertain Manifesto. | Lit Hub
- “Books I read ‘cause I’m addicted to literature.” The long tradition of literary allusions in hip-hop. | Lit Hub
- Meet the man brought to trial for “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” against the English language. | Lit Hub
- Xu Xi on money, guilt, and returning to Hong Kong to care for an aging parent. | Lit Hub
- The first reviews of John Updike’s “Rabbit” novels: from Rabbit, Run to Rabbit at Rest, and beyond. | Book Marks
- Sex, scandal, and swank: Guy Bolton’s guide to Los Angeles hotels in the Golden Age of mobsters and movie stars. | CrimeReads
- Read the first chapter of Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway. | BuzzFeed
- “Alex and Wendy believe in the algorithm.” Christian Lorentzen on the state of book criticism. | Harper’s
- “I’m speaking like I’m speaking for him too.” On the bittersweet afterlife of Ned Vizzini’s Be More Chill, five years after Ned Vizzini’s suicide. | The New York Times
- On the Mitford sisters, and their “story of aggressively nursed betrayals, both big and small… Imagine a Real Housewives franchise where half the cast goes Nazi.” | Jezebel
- This week, the National Book Critics Circle honored Arte Público Press, which has “made the Latino literary experience a reality for young Latina/o/x writers.” | NBC News
- The many problems with the Bad Sex in Fiction awards. | iai
Also on Lit Hub: Brian Gresko and Polly Rosenwaike talk writing and parenting • The British schoolboy memoir: masking misery with nostalgia • Read from Oksana, Behave!
