TODAY: In 1955, novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic James Agee dies.
- Introducing Lit Hub Longform: Michael Chabon wanders the roads of the West Bank with the tallest man in Ramallah. | Literary Hub
- Pamela Paul on the travails of bookselling, from Salman Rushdie to Scientology. | Literary Hub
- What’s so bad about being bored at work? On finding fulfillment outside of 9 to 5. | Literary Hub
- Fenton Johnson fulfills a promise and visits the parents of his late lover. | Literary Hub
- “Write what you know” is pretty lousy advice, warns Kate Southwood. | Literary Hub
- Alan Felsenthal: “I had only identified one true goal in life—to publish a book of poems before I die.” | Literary Hub
- Riveting psychic vomiting: a 1998 Bookforum review of Chris Kraus’s recently adapted I Love Dick. | Book Marks
- “I do believe that a great novel can change a culture. But at the same time, the culture resists being changed mightily.” An interview with Dorothy Allison. | Lenny
- Gloria Steinem on The Handmaid’s Tale, “a rare book, and the only novel I know, that portrays reproductive freedom as the basis of everything else.” | Early Bird Books
- Walking what remains of Marcel Proust’s Paris, from his former apartment building to the lycée where he wrote his earliest stories. | The New York Times
- “The only desire I have that compares to the way men talk about sex is my fervor for rehashing the past.” Short fiction by Samantha Hunt. | The New Yorker
- Where does the reader end and the market begin? Colin Dickey on The Insect Dialogues and the fraught and often invisible work of editing. | Slate
- “I think we waste a lot of time trying to convince other people that we’re right.” An interview with Ottessa Moshfegh. | The Believer Logger
- She gifts us words that we may have difficulty finding for ourselves: on the urgency and timeliness of Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life. | The New Inquiry
Also on Lit Hub: The charm of young Hemingway, the most “shot-up man in America” · Five Books Makng News This Week: songs, short stories, and Sophocles · “Flight,” new short fiction from Tessa Hadley.
