TODAY: In 1948, playwright and poet Ntozake Shange is born.
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- “You showed me all the strange ways words could come.” Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s letter to his mentors is lovely. | Lit Hub
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- What if we turned all the bankers’ mansions into libraries? A look inside the Morgan Library, a lavish work of Renaissance Revival architecture. | Lit Hub
- “He was a friend to the friendless, a strong voice for the maimed, funny as hell . . . He was a great American writer.” Amy Bloom on the legacy of Thom Jones. | Lit Hub
- A longform investigation into the life and death of Isidore Zimmerman, who spent two decades in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, then sued the state of New York. | CrimeReads
- Anna Burns’ Booker Prize-winner, Hari Kunzru on Murakami, bashing Barbara Kingsolver, and more Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
- “I believe that most people, not all but most, who get into trouble get into it with the best intentions.” An interview with Nico Walker. | Electric Lit
- Booker Prize winner Anna Burns on growing up in Belfast during the Troubles, The Artists’s Way, and the dizzying extremes of her recent career. | The Guardian
- “Higher education relies heavily on underpaid and insecure labor”: college professors might be liberal, but college campuses aren’t. | The Outline
- After nearly 50 years, Judy Blume has finally sold the film rights to Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. | Deadline
- “They are a force of chaos and misunderstanding, allied with shadowy corrupt governments, and often read as untouchable or un-confrontable.” On the American soldier in contemporary Arab novels. | Full Stop
- “It was the product of deep geology, a timescale well beyond the human, transformed in the body of the earth and offered up on the surface of its skin.” Madeleine Watts on skin cancer, bush poets, gold, beaches, and white skin in Australia. | The Believer
- Catherine Lacey on Joshua Rivkin’s Chalk and the erotics of Cy Twombly. | The Paris Review
Also on Lit Hub: Balancing a career as a novelist with raising an autistic child. • Idra Novey and Esmé W. Wang on writing and mental health • Read a story from Love Songs for a Lost Continent
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