TODAY: In 1938, Samuel Beckett’s novel Murphy is published by Routledge in London on the recommendation of his friend Jack Butler Yeats.
- For your consideration: the 32 most iconic poems in the English language. (We await your poetic dissent.) | Lit Hub
- “Our inner life takes place only rarely in the present.” Salvatore Scibona and Victor LaValle in conversation. | Lit Hub
- “All day you ask yourself, What are you doing all day?” Susan Minot on (not) writing. | Lit Hub
- “This is only appreciated by those who love to watch.” An attempt to see Paris through the eyes of Georges Perec. | Lit Hub
- On Fiction/Non/Fiction, C. Riley Snorton and T. Fleischmann talk gender, freedom, and transitivity, with Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan. | Lit Hub
- “Our environments—social, commercial, public, transactional, entertaining—are rife with linguistic resources.” Advice from Tony Hoagland on finding a poetic voice. | Lit Hub
- Why do we care who wrote Nancy Drew, anyway? Radha Vatsal on the mystery factory that churned out long-standing children’s series like “Nancy Drew,” the “Hardy Boys,” and “Tom Swift.” | CrimeReads
- Ottessa Moshfegh on Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero, Francisco Cantú on the meaning of the American frontier, and more of the Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
- Irvine Welsh’s “Trainspotting finale”, Dead Men’s Trousers: a sympathetic study of the contemporary male experience OR a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters? | Book Marks
- AT LAST, YOU GUYS (or possibly: OH NO, YOU GUYS): One Hundred Years of Solitude is finally coming to the small screen, courtesy Netflix. | The New York Times
- This year’s Plimpton Prize will be awarded to Kelli Jo Ford, and the Terry Southern Prize to Benjamin Nugent. | The Paris Review
- “As it turns out, my mama had been donating plasma for much more than a day.” Read an excerpt from Mitchell S. Jackson’s Survival Math. | BuzzFeed News
- Agatha Christie’s famous sleuth, Miss Marple, will be returning to television in a new series. | Variety
- With Brexit still looming, readers in the UK are buying translated literature from other European countries at a record rate. | The Guardian
- “My body suffers, the bodies of so many others suffer, and I only have so many methods of placing blame…for the ‘squandered’ world I inhabit for now.” On chemotherapy, Courtney Love, and poetry. | Full Stop
- Check out the 100 most widely stocked library books in the world. | OCLC
Also on Lit Hub: On the archetypes of the captivity narrative • Reading Deborah Levy in the early months of motherhood • On the New Books Network, the story of an all-female, anti-fascist bomb squad • Read from The Fox and Dr. Simamura
