TODAY: May Day, is the subject of F Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “May Day” (1920) about the 1919 May Day Riots.
- “You can have friends or you can correct people’s grammar.” The inimitable Mary Norris and Benjamin Dreyer talk grammar and style. | Lit Hub
- “We thought we were going to make the world better. I forget why we thought it, but we did.” Dorothy Parker: political activist, melancholic, bootleg Scotch-drinker. | Lit Hub
- Some of the best university press book designs of 2018. | Lit Hub
- April showers brought May books! Actually, the two are unrelated, but here are 11 books you should read. | Lit Hub
- The freedom of writing in a language your parents can’t read: Kia Abdullah on being herself in print. | Lit Hub
- This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Becca Schuh on biting criticism and the greatest modern year for books. | Book Marks
- Ahead of Malice Domestic this weekend, nominees for the Agatha Awards weigh in on the state of traditional mystery. | CrimeReads
- On Pola Oloixarac’s Dark Constellations and Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift, which “highlight how easily surveillance can masquerade as progress, and expose the subtle ways colonialism persists in contemporary political life.” | The Atlantic
- Laura Linney will star in a one-woman adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton on Broadway next year. | The New York Times
- Ouch, our childhoods: the forest that inspired A. A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood has caught fire. | BBC
- “Bread pudding was the first thing that I baked after I came out to my parents.” Bryan Washington on the comforts of queer baking (recipe included). | The New Yorker
- Good news for your next cool party: there’s now a Shakespeare edition of Trivial Pursuit. | Open Culture
- Not All Disgraced Politicians Get Book Deals: Former U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner is having a tough time finding a publisher interested in his book proposal. | New York Post
- Hindi pulp fiction is on the rise: an interview with the publisher bringing it from railway bookstore mainstay to mainstream literary culture. | Verve Magazine
Also on Lit Hub: On Reading Women, book recommendations for Asian Pacific Heritage Month • Balli Kaur Jaswal talks to Brad Listi about inner and outer worlds on Otherppl • Visiting a writing school for working people • Greg Bottoms on historical amnesia in the American South • Read a story from Ha Seong-nan’s collection Flowers of Mold (trans. Janet Hong).
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