TODAY: In 1899, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Nobel Prize-winning Guatemalan poet, is born.
- “If Trump hijacked the Republican Party, as is often said, he has steered it in a direction it was already pursuing.” Carlos Lozada on the recent history of the Republican Party. | Lit Hub Politics
- “Language radiating outward, lifeward, remains a focus in all of DeLillo’s work.” On the unexpected hopefulness of Don DeLillo’s latest novel. | Lit Hub Criticism
- “Will we choose to be accountable for these future-wounded bodies? Will we let these photographs save their lives?” Sarah Sentilles on the work of Debi Cornwall. | Lit Hub Photography
- Here’s your one-stop cheat-sheet for the week in virtual book events. | Lit Hub
- “Becoming an adult means perfecting your ability to rationalize your way into one small compromise after another.” Cory Doctorow on the difference between writing YA fiction and his latest “grown” novel. | Lit Hub Craft
- “The Voynich Manuscript embodies a period where science and magic were not separate, but depended upon one another.” Natalka Burian on the medieval manuscript that led her to her latest novel. | Lit Hub Craft
- “Life is a collage of contradictory emotions that do not at all obey the logic of cause and effect.” Reading the diaries of “Emilio Renzi,” Ricardo Piglia’s alter ego. | Lit Hub
- “A rhyming poet’s seemingly minor, local choices can ripple out and wrinkle the rest of the work.” Jason Guriel on writing a sci-fi rock ‘n’ roll novel in rhyming couplets. | Lit Hub
- Re-read Virginia Woolf, wait for Godot with Samuel Beckett, always (always!) side with the grizzlies, and other recommendations from Terry Tempest Williams. | Book Marks
- “I am a sentinel, here from a foray to the front lines of the old guard to relay that shit is not looking good out there.” Hillary Kelly did not like the new Don DeLillo, or the new Martin Amis. | Vulture
- On the formative friendship between Zora Neale Hurston and Fannie Hurst. | The New York Times
- A look into the Schomburg Shop, the independent bookstore within the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. | Financial Times
- “There’s a calm to being in a theater like that, particularly for anyone who grew up near malls. It’s very hard to have an existential crisis on an escalator.” Sloane Crosley on Yaddo, writing in a pandemic, and getting inspiration at the multiplex. | Criterion
- From books by Alicia Garza to Gwendolyn Patton, read these stories by and about powerful Black women. | The Root
- Stories about women’s courage “shaped how I imagined myself in the world,” says Maaza Mengiste. | Hindustan Times
- “I probably made it sound much worse than it really was.” Viet Thanh Nguyen interviews Adrian Tomine. | The Paris Review
