TODAY: In 1950, William Faulkner is awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
- “When Trebek ditched his soup strainer in 1997, it was mourned in People as one might an actual person: ‘Host Alex Trebek, 59, has shaved off his mustache, 20.’” Remembering one of the greats. | Lit Hub TV
- Why I paid tenfold to buy back the rights for two of my books: Kiese Laymon on revision, radical friendship, and community. | Lit Hub Memoir
- In 2018, four billion people around the world spent on average six hours a day online.” Kate Soper makes the environmental case for slowing waaaaay down. | Lit Hub Climate Crisis
- “This is what you must remember: The black hole event horizon is empty. The black hole is no thing. The black hole is nothing.” Got it! | Lit Hub Science
- “I think I have failed this question, sorry.” In which Jonathan Lethem takes issue with some of our questions. | Lit Hub
- “Perhaps by cleaving so closely to the facts, I was indeed trying to create a tapestry of truth.” Ruth Gilligan on the tricky task of mixing fact, fiction, myth, and everything in between. | Lit Hub Craft
- “The baths we make are our creation, dreams of life we could live.” A people’s history of bathing. | Lit Hub History
- “I don’t know what people’s problem is with queer folk, with Black folk, and I don’t know what some Black people’s problem is with themselves.” A conversation with poet Jericho Brown. | Lit Hub
- Dinty W. Moore recommends five books that have helped to define flash nonfiction, from Bernard Cooper’s Maps to Anywhere to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. | Book Marks
- A murder at Harvard and a half-century of silence: Becky Cooper investigates a decades-old mystery. | CrimeReads
- “Why is a word used to describe a literary technique also the word used to describe the buffoonery, the cruelty and carelessness, of contemporary political and economic life?” Merve Emre on gimmicks in literature and capitalism. | The New Yorker
- “It began with the hero making a disorienting leap from a bridge she hadn’t seen in so long it was like she had jumped, too.” Read a new ghost story by Alexander Chee. | T Magazine
- “I want it to be a place people can go for self-empowerment.” Dionne Sims on starting Black Garnet Books, the only Black-owned bookstore in Minnesota. | Mpls.St.Paul Magazine
- “I want the readers to really feel what I felt, in order for them to truly understand what it’s like to be a child immigrant.” Javier Zamora on writing and empathy. | Slate
- Who is the real Beth Harmon? It’s Walter Tevis—sort of. | The Ringer
- How do you resolve a series of delusions? Joshua Cohen seeks answers in the enigmatic fiction of Ann Quin.| The Paris Review
- Since the pandemic began, many more people have turned to journaling. | Vox
