TODAY: In 1918, crime novelist Frank Morrison Spillane, better known as Mickey Spillane, is born.
- Why American progressives should read a classic Czech novel: In praise of The Good Soldier Svejk. | Literary Hub
- Why is a Harvard business professor studying independent bookstores? | Literary Hub
- Hilary Mantel: “We still work to a man’s timetable and a man’s agenda.” | Literary Hub
- The complexities of designing a new cover of an old classic: Kimberly Glyder reimagines Gone With the Wind. | Literary Hub
- Curtis White: Even postmodernism’s most famous practitioners were pretty damn confused about it. | Literary Hub
- Luis Alberto Urrea, Smoketown stories, Angels in America, and more: the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- The New York Times Magazine music issue is here, featuring Angela Flournoy on Big Shaq, Chelsea Hodson on Lana Del Rey, Hanif Abdurraqib on Julien Baker, and more. | The New York Times Magazine
- “The books we read in childhood, having purloined them from some shelf supposed to be inaccessible, have something of the unreality and awfulness of a stolen sight of the dawn coming over quiet fields where the household is asleep.” From 1916, a Virginia Woolf dispatch on the love of reading. | The Times Literary Supplement
- “Twenty years ago, those sentences caused me almost physical pain. The curiosity that they inflamed, the sense of transcendence just out of reach, was extraordinary.” Katy Waldman on rereading Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. | The New Yorker
- “We started by going around the circle and describing how we were feeling in the moment. It was mostly anxiety and excitement—very American of us.” On making human connections at the Reflections Center for Conscious Living and Yoga. | Hazlitt
- On the Brothers Grimm’s “Bearskin,” or “What Would You Do for a Magic, Bottomless Purse?” | Tor
- “As if it’s not hard enough just to have a body, now you have to buy things to put on it in order to take it out with you into the world.” An excerpt from Alanna Okun’s The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater. | BuzzFeed Reader
- “Drawn to this sentence by its sexiness, we stay for its wild construction.” Abby Norwood on Joyce Carol Oates’s Black Water. | Tin House
Also on Literary Hub: A history lesson for silicon valley: Andrew Keen talks to Niall Ferguson • Five great reads from February • From The Right Intention, by Andres Barba translated by Lisa Dillman.
