TODAY: In 1984, playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and short-story author Irwin Shaw dies. Marlon Brando (shaking hands with Shaw) starred in the movie adapted from Shaw’s novel The Young Lions (1948).
- The best stories of the year: announcing the 2018 O. Henry Prize winners. | Lit Hub
- 12 Palestinian writers and artists reflect on the 70th anniversary of the Nakba. | Lit Hub
- How Kristen Arnett runs library storytime without boring kids to death (or suffering a nervous breakdown). | Lit Hub
- Rereading Little Women in its 150th anniversary year. | Lit Hub
- “My favorite critics draw deeply from life and share their own experience, and explore the connections between life and literature.” An interview with book critic David Varno. | Book Marks
- How crime writer Elmore Leonard first honed his literary skill with gritty Westerns. | CrimeReads
- Researchers have uncovered two hidden pages—containing dirty jokes and “sexual matters,” as well as a burgeoning literary sensibility—in Anne Frank’s diary. | The New York Times
- “I don’t know why Ramadan is the act of faith which has endured for me.” Hanif Abdurraqib on continuing to fast during Ramadan, despite no longer considering himself a practicing Muslim. | BuzzFeed Reader
- How the USSR “used translation to build ties between Moscow and oppressed peoples across the world,” and what was misconstrued (or invented) in the Soviet poetry anthology “Africa in America.” | The Paris Review
- “I don’t want boys to be deprived of roses and lip gloss any more than I want to be deprived of reading Marx.” An interview with poet and essayist Anne Boyer. | Mythos
- On David Foster Wallace, Georg Cantor, and the difficulty of writing about abstract mathematical ideas. | Lit Hub
- “I looked out and saw myself spread over the landscape like a coat of paint or butter.” Michael Pollan talks his own experience with psychedelics and their therapeutic efficacy. | NPR
- The Arch Mission Foundation and Astrobiotic are planning to send a microfiche library to the moon, where it should last for millions of years. | TechCrunch
- “Behold the lopsided ears! Behold the scraggly coat! Behold the lolling tongue, the malformed limb, the crooked tail!” On the poetics of Petfinder. | The New Yorker
Also on Lit Hub: Reading modern Japan’s greatest novelist Natsume Sōseki‘s bitingly critical first novel, I Am a Cat • In praise of the book-gif: why the world of literature should use motion as a communication tool • Read from Todd Robert Petersen’s It Needs to Look Like We Tried
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