TODAY: In 1906, English author T.H. White, best known for his Arthurian novels including The Sword in the Stone, is born.
- After the parties, after the drinks: the tiny Venetian island where Hemingway went to write. | Lit Hub
- From Star Wars to Lord of the Rings, how to build an entire fictional world. | Lit Hub
- Every day, another language dies: Heather Altfeld offers a final farewell to words we’ll never hear again. | Lit Hub
- Bradley Babendir isn’t crazy about being in nature, but sure loves reading about it. | Lit Hub
- From Art Spiegelman to Jesmyn Ward, Tomb of the Unknown Racist author Blanche McCrary Boyd on 5 books that have shaped her life. | Book Marks
- “In Lagos, she is as recognizable as the President. Her face is on billboards. People crowd around her at the airport.” Larissa Macfarquhar profiles Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. | The New Yorker
- “The sole criterion is, how does it move us? Does it pull us out of our everyday trot?” Rita Dove discusses her forthcoming tenure as the New York Times Magazine poetry editor. | CJR
- The shortlist for the golden Man Booker Prize—for the best of five decades’ worth of Booker winners—has been announced and is now up for a public vote. | The Guardian
- “She seems aware that scolding the conqueror is only another way of acknowledging his privileged position.” On the fictions of Chinese writer Eileen Chang. | The New York Review of Books
- A real-life book club goes to see Book Club, the new film starring Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen as book clubbers whose lives are turned upside down by Fifty Shades of Grey. | NPR
- “He doesn’t go to book parties. He doesn’t do lunch. He maintains, he says, no literary friendships.” A profile of Stig Abell, unlikely editor of Times Literary Supplement. | The New York Times
- “She wasn’t there physically, but she was still leading me.” Journalist Lynell George on conducting a “posthumous interview” with Octavia Butler. | BOMB
