TODAY: In 1969, Colson Whitehead, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, is born.
- “Sylvia Plath did not make her life into a work of art—we did. No curtain fell when she died.” Emily van Duyne on loving, and misunderstanding, an icon. | Lit Hub Biography
- “The forests are diminished and waste piles upon us… The earth is not impervious to the presence of man.” N. Scott Momaday, not mincing words. | Lit Hub Climate Change
- “The people listening want to keep a distance from the story being told.” Charles Bowden on the US-Mexico border and what America has chosen not to understand. | Lit Hub Politics
- “When the water has receded, the platforms remain as a reminder that this can all change…” Spend some time with Cees Nooteboom wandering through Venice. | Lit Hub Travel
- “The only darkness comes from the majority of Black and Latino prisoners.” Tiyo Attallah Salah-El navigates the racialized politics of prison. | Lit Hub Politics
- “So much of the story is in the rich, vivid, and active verbs. It’s something you can find in almost any Dylan song.” Tony Conniff does a close reading of “Tangled Up in Blue.” | Lit Hub Craft
- “Even now, in my sixties, I have to work to be forgiving and to forgive myself.” Sandra Cisneros talks to Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera about the #MeToo movement, narrative voice, and The House on Mango Street. | Lit Hub
- On examining your problematic childhood faves: Leanne Hall writes a letter to a dear old friend… who just happens to be fictional. | Lit Hub Criticism
- New titles from Nicole Krauss, David Sedaris, Shirley Hazzard, and Megan Hunter all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
- Crossing the border is deeply woven into the DNA of noir fiction—but what that border represents is ever-shifting. From Christopher Brown. | CrimeReads
- “Wilmington’s bleak story of voter suppression stems from a tale of two Reconstructions.” David Blight writing about David Zucchino’s history of North Carolina’s 1898 Wilmington coup is eerily topical. | NYRB
- “What does it mean—to you, to me, to Richard, to Emily Wilson, to William Barr—when we say someone is ‘left to his own devices’?” On The Odyssey, the election, Covid, and how we deal with crises in the absence of divine intervention. | Document
- “Rereading the book in adulthood reveals that it is also a story about neglect, remiss parenting and mental illness . . . The novel offers such practical ways of coping, and even of healing that it was once suggested it should be prescribed on the NHS.” Why The Secret Garden is a book for our times. | The Guardian
- Jonah Goldman Kay revisits William Eggleston’s photographs of Jimmy Carter’s hometown on the eve of the 1976 election. | The Paris Review
- From Twin Peaks to A Woman Scorned to Vanessa Place’s treatment of Margaret Mitchell to “I really don’t care, do u?”: Niela Orr on the “unhinged white woman” in pop culture. | The Baffler
- There is a lot of presidential candidate fan fiction. Perhaps… too much. Read an interview with the author of a particularly terrifying one that begins at the University of Pennsylvania. | Slate
- Acid house in Germany, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the time when raving was a politically radical act: On Rainald Goetz’s 1998 novel Rave. | The Nation
- A reading list of great Korean literature in translation. | Book Riot
