TODAY: In 1862, Henry David Thoreau dies.
- Did you know that there exists a made-for-TV movie version of To the Lighthouse starring baby Kenneth Branagh, and it’s actually… not bad? | Lit Hub Film
- “You cannot, in fact, ever locate the beginning, middle, or end of any story worth remembering.” Manuel Muñoz introduces the late H.G. Carrillo’s novel Loosing My Espanish. | Lit Hub
- Digging beyond the myths of America’s red-blue divide: Sarah Neilson on Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s American Harvest. | Lit Hub Politics
- ON THE VBC: On Sheltering, Phyllis Grant on cooking her way through quarantine · Tommy Orange and Kawai Strong Washburn discuss craft, failure, and sharks, live from Politics & Prose. | Lit Hub
- (Un)settle in with a book from Dr. Martha Stout’s reading list of sociopaths in literature, from Tom Ripley to Fagin. | Lit Hub
- “Now that he is dead, I can only ponder the questions with the answers secluded and forever distant.” J. Chester Johnson on his grandfather’s participation in the Elaine Race Massacre of 1919. | Lit Hub History
- “Things in the online world evolve, changing almost daily, and the slow cycle of writing and publishing a novel simply can’t keep pace.” Joyce Hinnefeld considers the obstacles of digital obsolescence. | Lit Hub
- Wendy Lesser goes on a pilgrimage to Kurt Wallander’s Ystad. | CrimeReads
- Casey Cep on James Baldwin and the Atlanta child murders, John Banville on Richard Ford’s short stories, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
- Daniel Radcliffe kicks off a collective reading of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Other celebrities associated with the “Potterverse” will participate in the coming weeks. | Wizarding World
- Your cross-country road trip might be on pause, but you can still read your way through America’s landscapes with these 50 books. | Wildsam
- A struggling magazine in Detroit devoted its latest issue not to Covid-19, but to 24 artists and writers from the city who “wanted to offer messages of hope … during the sorrow of this plague.” | Detroit Metro Times
- “In Mermaidville, we hug each other, we laugh together, and nobody has to wear a mask or swim six feet apart.” Amber Sparks on make-believe during a pandemic. | Parents
- Lucy Sweeney Byrne on autofiction and The Hills, “a total kick in the teeth to anyone who thinks this genre-bending stuff happening in writing is in any way new or interesting, or exclusive to the realm of the frenzied literati.” | 3:AM
- English translations of North Korean books are scarce, but offer a window into everyday life there. | The New York Times
- An important lesson of Shirley Jackson’s work: “Madness is born of too much time alone.” | Jezebel
Also on Lit Hub: Mary Hawthorne on the object lessons of Annie Ernaux’s The Years • What pop stars can teach writers about failure • Read a story from Karen Tei Yamashita’s collection, Sansei and Sensibility.
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