TODAY: In 1934, Irish writer John McGahern is born.
- Observe; take notes; revise constantly: ten recommendations for good writing habits from Lydia Davis. | Lit Hub
- “When I read her translations I feel I am responding to paragraphs penned by Turgenev and Tolstoy themselves.” Sara Wheeler on Constance Garnett and the problem of era-specific translations. | Lit Hub
- “This is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced.” Read Greta Thunberg’s urgent speech at the UN. | Lit Hub Climate Change
- Bad reviews, disastrous elections, and the intellectual state of play in 1964 New York: On the build-up to the legendary Baldwin-Buckley debates. | Lit Hub
- “Given its density of authors per capita, what happened in Key West did not always stay in Key West.” On Elizabeth Bishop’s time on the island of her dreams. | Lit Hub
- “Why run at all, let alone for hours at a time?” James Chesbro on the art of the running memoir, from marathoners to Murakami | Lit Hub Sports
- When bad studies become pro-war political tools: on the lack of science linking testosterone to violence. | Lit Hub Science
- Susannah Cahalan, Jaquira Díaz, and more take the Lit Hub Questionnaire. | Lit Hub
- “Crime fiction hits us where we’re most vulnerable.” Michael Seidlinger looks at the literature of home invasion. | CrimeReads
- “I love Mr. Spock because he reminds me of you, I said.” Michael Chabon on writing for Star Trek and his father’s death. | The New Yorker
- “I sometimes fear that all of humankind may sooner or later come to my conclusion: that reading fiction is a waste of time.” Isaac Bashevitz Singer wonders: who needs literature? | LARB
- Amazon Crossing, the company’s literary translation imprint, is now the most prolific publisher of translated literature in the US. | Publishers Weekly
- Feel free to enjoy these three great and unproblematic old white male authors. | Mel Magazine
- How much does the age of “alternative facts” owe to the literary and philosophical traditions of postmodernism? | Vox
- The Bookworm, a major English-language bookstore in Beijing, closed suddenly on Monday as part of the Chinese government’s ongoing closures of “illegal structures.” | Books + Publishing
Also on Lit Hub: The 10 best translated novels of the decade • Why resistance is foundational to Kurdish literature • Read an excerpt from Trevor Shikaze’s short story from in the fall 2019 issue of n+1.
