TODAY: In 1810, Lord Byron swims across the Hellespont, a tumultuous strait in Turkey, copying legendary Greek hero Leander, who supposedly swam the same four-mile stretch.
- If it works for chickens… How a Coney Island sideshow kept thousands of premature babies alive. | Lit Hub
- Meghan O’Rourke and Jess Row discuss fate, fortune, and responsibility with V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell, on a new episode of Fiction/Non/Fiction. | Lit Hub
- A rare conversation with the cult Chinese writer Xi Xi. | Lit Hub
- Charles Simic on Tracy K. Smith, Ron Charles on David Duchovny, and more: 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- Jean-Patrick Manchette’s son remembers his father’s outsized impact on French crime writing. | CrimeReads
- A profile of Pulitzer Prize finalist Hernán Diaz, whose debut novel In the Distance is “an uncanny achievement: an original Western.” | The New York Times
- What if alien lifeforms are as bad as managing their planets as we are? On why we have yet to make contact. | Lit Hub
- “She is like nothing so much as that high little YouTube child fresh from the dentist, strapped into a car going he knows not where, further and further from his own will. Where is real life to be found?” Patricia Lockwood on Rachel Cusk. | LRB
- The Obama Presidential Center will be the first to include a branch of the public library. | Chicago Sun Times
- “Yeah, she only wrote the one good book.” And other ways we suppress women’s writing… | Lit Hub
- “Acker wants to keep open the questions of what a human is and what forms of life we might potentially create ourselves.” On the resurgent interest in Kathy Acker’s work. | LARB
- Annie Proulx has won the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. | The Washington Post
- “How could a person be too smart, too knowledgeable, too curious? And why won’t you just let them get on with it?” Lauren Oyler on Helen DeWitt. | The Baffler
- “Love is not treated like the key to a final door, but the force that drives you to walk through whatever mysteries might lay beyond.” Our fairy tales, ourselves. | Catapult
Also on Literary Hub: John Berger on smoking: “We smoked between games of tennis.” · 14 books to avoid if you’re hungry: Memoirs, recipes, fictional restaurants and more · Read from Heather Abel’s new novel, The Optimistic Decade
