TODAY: In 1873, The U.S. Congress enacts the Comstock Law, making it illegal to send any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” books through the mail. Above, the symbol of Comstock’s New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
- Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins is adapting Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad… More importantly, here’s who he should cast in the leading roles.
- On the postcards from her mother that helped Rowan Hisayo Buchanan survive her childhood.
- In praise of fictional big sisters (who rarely get their due).
- On the great Daniel Woodrell, noir bard of meth country.
- Reading as a fan is very, very different to reading as a creator: Ta-Nehisi Coates on his Black Panther comic series. | The New York Times
- On Madonna in a Fur Coat, “an apolitical book” that “has found massive appeal seventy years later among Turkey’s activist youth.” | Tin House
- A reading list for “citizens of nowhere”: Mohsin Hamid recommends five works of transnational literature. | Five Books
- “There may be something about the pure resistance against the institutions that told us our very existence was wrong. There was definitely a clarifying urgency to rejecting those ideas.” An interview with Cara Hoffman. | Broadly
- There was a silence as still as the plains: An exclusive excerpt from David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I. | The New Yorker
- Lou Reed’s archives have been acquired by the New York Public Library, and Anthology Editions will publish a collection of his personal essays, poems, and photographs. | The New Yorker, Anthology
- On the oil company PR campaign that provided Dr. Seuss with his “first foray into creating rhyming stories as books.” | The Christian Science Monitor
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