TODAY: In 1959, Richard “Dick” Hickock and Perry Smith murder four members of the Clutter Family at their farm outside Holcomb, Kansas, the subject of Truman Capote book In Cold Blood.
- “‘Now’ is a moveable feast. It can stretch and shrink moments as it wants.” Samantha Harvey on the melancholy of reverse narratives. | Lit Hub
- Announcing the winner of the Restless Books New Immigrant Writing Prize. | Lit Hub
- “Guys, I’m rich. What can I get for you?” How Saul Bellow reckoned with fame and fortune. | Lit Hub
- “It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.” Jonathan Franzen’s 10 rules for novelists, only some of which make us sad. | Lit Hub
- Huda Al-Marashi on her parents’ arranged marriage, and why she wanted something different. | Lit Hub
- “Hatred could not justify child murder, but fear could.” How America remembers Emmett Till. | Lit Hub
- Superior socialist sex, Franzen’s fowl friends, and more of the Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
- From climate change to car crash sex: looking back at 5 classic J.G. Ballard novels. | Book Marks
- From the 1930s to the present day, J. Kingston Pierce delivers a brief history of reporters in crime fiction. | CrimeReads
- Lest you think Jonathan Franzen has run out of things to say about birds in interviews—he has not. | The Guardian
- Sports for nerds! On the 6th Annual Book Sorting Contest. | Electric Lit
- “Scarcely a (secret) meeting of the OuLiPo goes by without our bringing up your name and ruing your absence.” An excerpt from Marcel Duchamp’s correspondence with the Oulipo. | McSweeney’s
- “Nothing superfluous is a good way of describing both a cat and A Cat.” Sigrid Nunez on Leonard Michaels, cat person. | The Paris Review
- “My method for writing is a very suicidal one.” Garth Risk Hallberg and Javier Marías in conversation. | The Millions
- “Authors get intimate notes because our minds enter other people’s minds, our hearts their hearts. Lonely people want to tell us about it.” But what happens when those lonely notes become harassment? | Longreads
- A reading list on what it takes to fight forest fires. | The New York Times
Also on Lit Hub: Essential writing advice from J.G. Ballard • How to arrange a 1890s-style shotgun wedding • Read “One Ton Prop,” a short story by Christopher Kang
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