TODAY: In 1923, Italo Calvino is born in Santiago de las Vegas, Havana, Cuba.
- The first in our series of books that defined the decades: the 1900s. | Lit Hub
- “It gives a very worn racial subject defiantly modern treatment.” Darryl Pinckney on Nella Larsen’s Passing. | Lit Hub
- “My job was to make Donald Trump a hero and a top expert on golf.” Meakin Armstrong recalls the time he interviewed the Donald for Trump Style magazine. | Lit Hub
- On But That’s Another Story, Jen Doll talks to Will Schwalbe about being an outsider, and (finally) becoming a writer. | Lit Hub
- Battle of the Book Titles: Who Wore it Better? | Book Marks
- “This is what makes du Maurier’s novel so subversive; she indicts the narrator and the reader, each of whom is guilty for siding with Maxim, a bad, bad man.” Lisa Gabriele on re-reading Rebecca in the time of Trump. | CrimeReads
- “It’s very likely that if I didn’t smoke, I wouldn’t write at all”: Javier Marias on cigarettes, translating Ashbery, and why naturalism is overrated. | The Paris Review
- Who is the most Instagrammed writer of all time (an in-depth infographic examination). | Electric Lit
- “Orlando laid the groundwork for today’s cultural landscape, in which the boundaries of both gender and literary genre are more porous than ever”: Joanna Scutts on why Virginia Woolf’s “romp” of a novel feels so vital right now. | Vulture
- Maryse Condé has been awarded The New Academy Prize in Literature, also known as the Alternative Nobel. | The New York Times
- “The men who harass me know three things: I’m Chinese-American, my husband is white, and our son is multiracial.” Celeste Ng on her online harassers. | The Cut
- International publishers, like the rest of us, are depressed. Their solution? “Up-lit.” | The Guardian
- From Virginia Hamilton to Colson Whitehead: an essential black folklore reading list “that’ll get you up to speed on every kind of boo hag, br’er creature, obayifo, and tar baby there is.” | Shondaland
Also on Lit Hub: Michelle Bailat-Jones on wending between life and fiction. • How to write a fellowship essay when your process is chaos. • Read from One Part Woman.
