TODAY: In 1763, James Boswell is introduced to Samuel Johnson at Thomas Davies’s bookshop in Covent Garden, London.
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- Pibulsak Lakonpol’s dispatch from a refugee’s no man’s land at the Thai-Burmese border. | Lit Hub
- David McCullough’s The Pioneers: vibrant and compelling OR told with a narrow perspective? | Book Marks
- Karen Russell’s uncanny worlds, Walter Isaacson on George Packer on Richard Holbrooke, and more of the Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
- Summer is here! Which means it’s time to read some crime fiction. Here are over 100 picks from the summer’s best and hottest titles. | CrimeReads
- “I feel like I’m the great American crime writer. You can make that case.” Read a profile of James Ellroy, “the Demon Dog of American fiction.” | 1843
- On the “pernicious, scapegoating effect” of J.D. Vance’s vision of Appalachia—and the many other voices that should be championed instead. | The Baffler
- “Belinda Blinked is writing so bad that it transcends mere constructs of quality and becomes its own absurdist feat of virtuosity.” On My Dad Wrote a Porno and the joy of reading really, really bad sex scenes in literature. | The Atlantic
- William Boyd on John Buchan, the late Victorian-era Scot whose book The Thirty-Nine Steps improbably inspired a Hitchcock film and the modern spy novel. | New Statesman
- “On August 27, Hemingway mailed La Cossitt the most remarkable document he ever sent to Collier’s: his expense account.” The story of Hemingway’s $187,000 magazine expenses claim. | CJR
- Maybe the most important takeaway from the mediocre final season of Game of Thrones is how good of an imagination George R.R. Martin has. | The Ringer
- “We’ve all had to respond to America as it existed at a given time.”: An interview with Maurice Carlos Ruffin on race, political activism and the American South. | LARB
Also on Lit Hub: Juliet Grames on restoring the legacies of our difficult grandmothers on The Maris Review • Dani Shapiro on unraveling her family’s history • The time Samuel Johnson met James Boswell (in a bookstore, naturally) • Read from Julia Phillips’ debut novel Disappearing Earth.
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