TODAY: In 1901, the court case Cherry vs. Des Moines Leader is decided in favor of the paper, upholding the right to fair comment. The Cherry Sisters had sued the newspaper for libel after the newspaper printed a scathing review of their vaudeville touring act.
- “These poems are arguments and conversations that America should be having with itself right now.” Dean Kuipers reads Jim Harrison’s posthumous poetry collection. | Lit Hub
- Are you a Roger or a Tiger? Hamilton Cain on specialization versus variety, and David Epstein’s Range. | Lit Hub
- While hiking Cormac McCarthy’s Western wilderness Raksha Vasudevan comes face to face with the myths that make America. | Lit Hub
- “On a Sunbeam gives us that city, or cosmos, of women and non-binary people, made extraordinary by virtue of its sheer ordinariness.” Gabrielle Bellot on the dreamy, queer space opera we need right now. | Lit Hub
- “If you look back, you are lost. How could you have written this drivel?” Ian Fleming explains how to write a thriller. | Lit Hub
- What can we learn from the decline of Turkish democracy? Ece Temelkuran on Erdogan, Trump, and the slow descent into the banality of evil. | Lit Hub
- This week in Shhh…Secrets of the Librarians: Mary Catherine Kinniburgh on the treasures of the New York Public Library. | Book Marks
- The White Devil’s Daughter author Julia Flynn Siler recommends five books of narrative history, from Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains to Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. | Book Marks
- The reigning queen of crime Sara Paretsky, in conversation with Lori Rader-Day, talks writing, feminism, and life. | CrimeReads
- “As some of you like to point out in your emails, I am 60 years old and fat, and you don’t want me to ‘pull a Robert Jordan’ on you and deny you your book.” What George R. R. Martin, Hilary Mantel, Anne Rice, and others have said about being under pressure from fans. | The Guardian
- Hulu has ordered an anthology horror series based on Nathan Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters, which came out in 2013 from Kelly Link’s Small Beer Press. | Deadline
- “You can unite millions of people by making them believe in completely fictional stories about God, about race or about economics.” Historian Yuval Noah Harari on why fiction trumps truth. | The New York Times
- Kathryn Scanlan on how she plucked a stranger’s diary from the trash and turned it into her debut novel. | Publishers Weekly
- “Over the course of a season, Doolittle estimates he will read about 25 books, a lighter load than during the rest of the year”: On Washington Nationals closer Sean Doolittle’s mission to support independent bookstores during the travel season. | The Wall Street Journal
- Some of John Lennon’s handwritten poems from his book A Spaniard in the Works will go to auction in London next month. | Just Collecting
Also on Lit Hub: On So Many Damn Books, comics legend Seth Talks Virginia Woolf, Charles Schultz, and his latest book • The origins of Jean-Michel Basquiat • Meg Donohue on the enduring appeal of literary retellings • Read from Gabriela Ybarra’s debut novel, The Dinner Guest (trans. Natasha Wimmer).
