TODAY: In 2014, poet Galway Kinnell, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1982 collection, Selected Poems and split the National Book Award for Poetry with Charles Wright, dies.
- The rise of the Great American Conspiracy: Renata Salecl, Jonathan Berman, and Tea Krulos talk anti-vaxxers, QAnon, incels and more. | Lit Hub Politics
- On the 19th-century food writer who embraced gluttony as a virtue: discovering the complicated pleasures of Elizabeth Robins Pennell. | Lit Hub Food
- Inside the spare and extravagant homes of six iconic writers: on the architectural tastes of Melville, Wharton and more. | Lit Hub
- “Leonard, to Virginia, was a stabilizing force—a refuge, a sanctuary—to which, after the wide-eyed wilderness of forging something new, finding the word, she could return.” We could all use a Leonard Woolf right about now. | Lit Hub
- “Our rides were exhilarating, not only for the miles we covered but because his conversation, so casual and good natured, was also fearless.” Riding in cars with John Ashbery. | Lit Hub
- “I mostly remember the dinners.” Fran Lebowitz on the glamorous worlds of Camilla McGrath. | Lit Hub
- On Sylvia Plath’s creative breakthrough at the Yaddo Artists’ Colony. | Lit Hub
- “I spent the first five years of my life in the woods of Lake Baikal, and Baba Yaga lived there, too.” Life advice from a mythic Slavic witch? | Lit Hub
- Legendary NYC bookstore The Strand called for help and book lovers answered—but they (and others like them) really shouldn’t have to. | The New York Times, Slate
- “The status quo signals that certain lives are worthy of being transformed into literature regardless of how prosaic and boring they may be, while others are not.” Tope Folarin asks what it means that there are so few Black writers of autofiction—at least according to the critics. | The New Republic
- Jess Bergman on Susan Taubes and her recently republished Divorcing, “a compendium of severance: not just a wife from her husband, but a family from their homeland, and a people from their God.” | Jewish Currents
- A new scientific study suggests that reading different kinds of fiction affects the brain in different ways (lovers of the most popular genre fiction will roll their eyes). | Psy Post
- The PEN/Benenson Courage Award will be given to Darnella Frazier, the teenager whose video recording of George Floyd’s death helped spark the global resurgence of the Movement for Black Lives. | Insider
- Bryan Washington recommends five books that make peace with uncertainty. | The Daily Beast
