TODAY: In 1966, Truman Capote hosts his infamous Black and White Ball in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza hotel.
- Claire Vaye Watkins: from the desert to the heartland, a brief history of some houses in my life. | Literary Hub
- The lure of writing for white readers: Aisha Sabatini Sloan wonders what might have been with her MFA. | Literary Hub
- The only dissident novel available in Turkey: on the perennial relevance of Madonna in a Fur Coat. | Literary Hub
- On the promise (and failure) of virtual reality. | Literary Hub
- J. Courtney Sullivan in praise of the patron saint of girls who ask too many questions: Anne of Green Gables. | Literary Hub
- “It has made me want to re-establish connections with the Conrad whose written sentences once inspired in me the same joy as a musical phrase.” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on Maya Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World. | Book Marks
- “Poetry is the most distilled version of how the brain works, if it’s done right.” An interview with Jason Reynolds. | Electric Literature
- On loving both Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus, even if they “did not love . . . did not even ‘like’” each other. | Bookforum
- Despite the best efforts of preservationists, James Baldwin’s former home in France will be demolished after all—and replaced with a luxury apartment complex. | The New York Times
- “The hair on his chest, too. And, of course, Frank’s dick.” “It’s front and center.” Eileen Myles and Jeremy Sigler go to an exhibition of Larry Rivers paintings (including his famous nude portrait of O’Hara). | The Paris Review
- On Nabokov, bad readers, and the “narrowly politicized version of reading and writing critique that dominates interpretive practices today.” | Boston Review
- “I took a great pleasure in killing them.” Speaking with Brazilian actress-cum-novelist Fernanda Torres about her book The End, which chronicles the deaths of “five incorrigible old beach bums of the Bossa Nova generation.” | The New Yorker
- “A collection of baby names is like a taxonomy of hope, a kind of catechism for future lives scattered over the horizon.” What is contained in potential children’s names. | Hazlitt
