TODAY: In 1864, journalist Elizabeth Cochran Seaman, better known by her pen name Nellie Bly, is born.
- “My big girl, I decided, would stay big, and get her happy ending in spite of it.” Jennifer Weiner on writing fat, happy characters for 20 years. | Lit Hub
- Did the Italians actually teach the French the vinaigrette? Bill Buford follows the trail of a culinary mystery. | Lit Hub Food
- Samanta Schweblin on writer’s block, The Twilight Zone, and the “rebel commonplace” of writing any time or place. | Lit Hub
- Sheila Heti, Noreen Khawaja, and Clare Carlisle discuss Kierkegaard, authenticity, and how to be a human. | Lit Hub
- A rollicking trip through Iceland, a modern gothic/campus novel, and more books you should read in May, as recommended by Lit Hub staff and contributors. | Lit Hub
- ON THE VBC: On Sheltering, Kate Milliken discusses her debut novel Kept Animals, and running toward danger · Maya Shanbhag Lang on the surprise of memoir writing and the value of false narratives, on Personal Space. | Lit Hub
- “The coronavirus pandemic makes me miss Việt Nam but also reminds me that home is where my family is.” Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai on the idea of home in a time of displacement. | Lit Hub
- Tracking down the elusive good marriage in crime fiction with Kimberly McCreight. | CrimeReads
- Kept Animals author Kate Milliken recommends five novels born from the mother-child bond, from Cristina Henríquez’s The Book of Unknown Americans to Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays. | Book Marks
- Though the days bleed together, we’ve still got this week’s new books to look forward to. | The Hub
- Colson Whitehead, Jericho Brown, and Anne Boyer are among the winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes. | The Hub
- Alert: here is a previously unpublished short story by Katherine Dunn, discovered in her archive. | The New Yorker
- “They will be more refreshed and have more things to think about if they will sit down and read.” How reading got farm women through the Great Depression. | JSTOR
- They’ve got a bone to pick with the tabloids: the official tell-all account of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s lives as royals will be published this year. | Associated Press
- Tim Bray, a top Amazon engineer, resigned due to the company’s firing of whistleblowers, a move he calls (among other things) “chickenshit.” | ongoing by Tim Bray
- Taking cues from Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature on how to stay decadent while staying inside. | The Paris Review
- A pandemic was instrumental to shaping Madeleine L’Engle’s worldview. | Vanity Fair
Also on Lit Hub: James Gardner explores just how much the Louvre has weathered, including wars, uprisings, and—yes—a plague • “The Waltz”: A poem from John Freeman’s collection The Park • Read an excerpt from Eimear McBride’s new novel Strange Hotel.
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