TODAY: In 1939, playwright Terrence McNally, “the bard of American theater,” is born.
- “We have taken a path of improvisation and experimentation.” How the literary world reinvented the book festival in real time. | Lit Hub
- “To be forever alone in your own kingdom seems a unique kind of heartbreak.” LA’s resident mountain lion is a lonely hunter. | Lit Hub Nature
- The age of small-scale societal reforms should have ended long ago: Michelle Jackson on the myths of American opportunity. | Lit Hub Politics
- “Being in people’s homes with them, almost whispering through the screen, made it feel like every story was a shared secret.” On the odd life of a Zoom poet-for-hire. | Lit Hub
- “A recipe is a story that can’t be plagiarized.” Priya Basil on the living histories of regional cuisine. | Lit Hub Food
- “Is there anything more beautiful than night in a Soviet microregion?” Valzynhya Mort answers a question we didn’t know needed asking. | Lit Hub
- Read a new short story by George Saunders, in which a man plays “Squatting Ghoul Eight” in the Hell-themed cave of an amusement park. (Relatable!) | The New Yorker
- “Many newcomers to the suburbs are not only surviving but excelling. They are reshaping the story in their own image, but they are also living with the knowledge that such a story is precarious.” Simon Han on the changing face—and story—of the American suburbs. | The Paris Review
- “To what extent were you justified in getting rid of a tyrant?”: A new book examines the minor figures who played a role in the plot against Julius Caesar. | Smithsonian Magazine
- Why did so many students in mid-20th-century China grow up knowing Mark Twain’s satirical newspaper article “Running for Governor”? | The Buffalo News
- “Cute socks would make me think for a minute.” This “thirsty” conversation with Bryan Washington, first in a new interview series entitled “How Are You So Hot?,” will make you feel slightly better about the world. | VICE
- “I wanted to show the messiness, the derangement of longing and the way the power oscillates.” Raven Leilani talks about Luster and portraying “two serious women trying to assert their needs.” | The Bookseller
- “If you come from a so-called minority, let’s say me as an Asian American, you live in a condition of narrative scarcity.” Viet Thanh Nguyen on the burden of representation and more at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. | Los Angeles Times
