TODAY: In 1819, Walt Whitman is born.
- Remembering Denis Johnson: Joy Williams, Jim Shepard, Chris Adrian and more recall one of the great writers of his generation · How James Boice found family in the pages of Jesus’ Son. | Literary Hub
- Chris Kraus on why you should read Eileen Myles’ first novel. | Literary Hub
- Samantha Irby is not afraid to talk sh*t. | Literary Hub
- Cutting the NEA would be particularly terrible for women artists. | Literary Hub
- A playlist for Nabokov’s Lolita, from Tony Bennett to Lana del Rey to Aesop Rock. | Literary Hub
- Race, murder, and injustice: a brief history of crime writing in Atlanta. | Literary Hub
- When no one is climaxing, will we keep reading? A brief history of sex in American fiction. | Bookforum
- “I know they are asking after their friend, the one I helped kill.” An excerpt from Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. | Oxford American
- On Amazon’s newest bookstore and brick-and-mortar business model, which “is designed to further popularize, on Amazon, that which is already popular on Amazon” and cannot be seen as “an existential threat to anything.” | The New Yorker, The New Republic
- Measured by the sheer number of miles covered, Nabokov is the most American of authors: Tracing Nabokov’s journey across the country. | Signature Reads
- “It is the job of the Albee estate to protect his property. But barring an African-American actor from playing Nick inevitably leads to the question: Protect it from what?” On the Edward Albee estate’s controversial decision to deny rights to a recent production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? | Vulture
- You knew you’d leave behind that bourgeois torpor: An excerpt from Francesco Pacifico’s novel, Class. | n+1
- On George Roy Hill’s 1972 screen version of Slaughterhouse-Five, which made Kurt Vonnegut “drool and cackle. . . because it is so harmonious with what [he] felt when [he] wrote the book.” | Library of America
Also on Lit Hub: Lore Segal recalls a refugee’s WWII · The story behind Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’) On the Dock of the Bay” · Two stories by Abdellah Taïa from the collection Another Morocco.
