TODAY: In 1819, Walt Whitman is born.
- When Walt Whitman’s poems were rejected for being too timely. | Lit Hub
- How Rebekah Frumkin learned to write characters that made her feel less alone. | Lit Hub
- Anxious, impatient, seasick, married: on the not-so-great start to Mary and Percy Shelley’s life together. | Lit Hub
- Writing about our prison state: Reginald Dwayne Betts and Zachary Lazar talk to Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan on Fiction/Non/Fiction. | Lit Hub
- “I never wanted to be an evil stepmother…” Danielle Teller no longer thinks of herself as an “entirely good person.” | Lit Hub
- Is seeking resolution in fiction an inherently conservative choice? Michael Niemann on the politics of crime fiction. | CrimeReads
- Alan Cumming on David Sedaris, Patricia Lockwood on Rachel Cusk, and other must-read book reviews from this week. | Book Marks
- “Poetry—which awakens our senses, frees us from the tyranny of literal meaning and assures us of the credible reality of emotional truth—puts us in touch with something bigger than language. . .” Read a speech delivered by Tracy K. Smith at the Library of Congress. | The Washington Post
- Legendary crime fiction author Walter Mosley on writing for television, legalizing drugs, and his advice for young writers. | Vulture
- Chuck Palahniuk is “close to broke” after an accountant at his literary agency embezzled $3.4 million. | The Guardian
- On the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, whose 1968 “Poem” has lately become “a vehicle for anti-Trump sentiment.” | The Paris Review
- “Even hearing his warm, patrician baritone—once described by a critic as ‘sandpaper and velvet’—over the phone feels like an experience worth paying for.” A profile of popular and prolific audiobook narrator Grover Gardner. | The Village Voice
- “Mastering a difficult task . . . is about relinquishing our ordinary selves, our ordinary world.” Josephine Livingstone on the memoir of a professional tree climber and the sublimity of climbing trees. | The New Republic
- Today, in classic literary icon news: Hailee Steinfeld will be playing Emily Dickinson in a new TV series, and Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz is making a movie about Christopher Marlowe. | Variety
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