TODAY: In 1850, Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, is born.
- We can’t help it if we’re from Florida: Lidia Yuknavitch on what is now becoming the most literarily considered state in the union. | Literary Hub
- Bookselling through the fire: a Napa bookseller calls for help. | Literary Hub
- On some of the violent truths behind the best rural noir. | Literary Hub
- Martha Collins on what we can learn from multiple translations of the same poem. | Literary Hub
- The adaptation of George Saunders’ “Sea Oak” is exactly how a great short story should become a great TV show. | Literary Hub
- Radhika Jones, the editorial director of the New York Times books department, is expected to be named the next editor of Vanity Fair. | The New York Times
- “Second Life started to seem less like an obsolete relic and more like a distorted mirror reflecting the world many of us live in.” Leslie Jamison on the dwindling number of users who’ve remained loyal to the online virtual world launched in 2003. | The Atlantic
- The original Gone Girl: On Agatha Christie’s 11-day “disappearance” in 1926, which she may or may not have orchestrated to get back at her philandering husband. | Broadly
- “I see these stories as a way of listening to the ancestry.” Maria Tatar and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discuss their Annotated African American Folktales. | NPR
- A new book featuring photographs of Prince in his private life reveal the late musician’s power “to make the ordinary aesthetically lush.” | The New Yorker
- “I refuse to let the Jewish figure be defined by anti-Semites.” An interview with Diaspora Boy cartoonist and writer Eli Valley. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- How to make cornmeal dumplings just like Janie from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. | The Paris Review
