TODAY: In 1942, best-selling author and screenwriter Michael Crichton is born.
- Fire in the hills: Smoke and cinder in the land of Jack London · Of the indigenous creation myths of Sonoma Mountain · Rebecca Solnit on the aftermath of the California wildfires| Literary Hub, The New Yorker
- Megan Mayhew Bergman explores the Tao of sunbathing. | Literary Hub
- Fall is the best time to be a poet. | Literary Hub
- Reading The Aeneid in 2017: how the oldest stories can help us understand the way we live now. | Literary Hub
- What’s a currybook? On authenticity and what’s expected of South Asian writers. | Literary Hub
- “Walt Whitman is as unacquainted with art as a hog is with mathematics.” A scathing, anonymous 1855 review of Leaves of Grass. | Book Marks
- Marilynne Robinson on the value of the humanities, “those aptly named disciplines that make us consider what human beings have been, and are, and will be. Sometimes I think they should be renamed Big Data.” | New York Review of Books
- “What Wenner understood clearly from the start was that rock and roll was about sex.” An excerpt from Sticky Fingers, a new biography about Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner. | Vulture
- “Many residents will never return to the lives they had before the fires, but will find new capacities in themselves and new possibilities and roles in their communities.” Rebecca Solnit on the aftermath of the California wildfires. | The New Yorker
- In which Philip Pullman answers questions from Ali Smith, the former archbishop of Canterbury, and Ed Sheeran. | The Guardian
- A reading list of books that have helped Claire Vaye Watkins through the hellscape of 2017. | The Rumpus
- Mental illness shouldn’t be scored with The Shins: On the “romantic mythology of the mentally ill woman,” from Ophelia to 13 Reasons Why. | Broadly
- “Try as I might to push him out, I find that Eliot’s abiding contempt—for the domestic, for brown skin. . . is not repulsive in a simple way.” Reflections on a conflicted love for T.S. Eliot’s work. | Tin House
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