TODAY: In 1996, New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell dies.
- Katherine Heiny on jumping from early literary success to cranking out YA titles, and how it made her a better writer. | Literary Hub
- Vera Pavlova writes poems you can read by the light of a single match (and other compellingly Russian sentiments). | Literary Hub
- Virginia Woolf: There are way too many personal essays out there. | Literary Hub
- How a 12th-century Iranian poem can help us navigate these hard times we live in. | Literary Hub
- How to make peace with the void through birdwatching. | Literary Hub
- Literary Twin Peaks: a bookish guide to David Lynch’s once and future masterpiece. (SPOILER ALERT for those of you who haven’t seen the original series, which, really?) | Literary Hub
- Joy Williams on the “wily freshness” and “breezy nastiness” of Karen Russell’s stories. | Book Marks
- Before she began writing poetry, Emily Dickinson was a budding botanist, engaged in “the gathering, growing, classification, and pressing of flowers.” | Brain Pickings
- Elisabeth Moss will star in—and executive produce—a BBC America mini-series about “Typhoid Mary,” adapted from Mary Beth Keane’s novel Fever. | Variety
- “Even in great historical fiction, I find myself getting lost in the intrigue of the era.” An interview with Amelia Gray. | Chicago Review of Books
- 10 books to read if you’re goth in the country, from Shirley Jackson to Angela Carter. | Electric Literature
- “It’s where all of our sins go to be washed away by the ocean.” Jason Diamond takes a road trip through Florida. | The New York Times
- Using the master’s font to footnote the master text: On artist Jenifer Wightman’s quest to addend every known Gutenberg bible with a broadside “that reinterprets the story of Adam and Eve using evolutionary and contemporary science.” | Pacific Standard
- “Do we need to scour the archives for more hidden Whitman, or should we instead figure out how to better read the Whitman we have?” On the recently discovered The Adventures of Jack Engle. | The Paris Review
Also on Lit Hub: Literary Long Weekend: your bookish guide to Charleston, South Carolina · Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich on the body as a map, and living with trauma · Read a new story by Samrat Upadhyay, from his collection Mad Country.
