TODAY: In 1849, Edgar Allan Poe is found delirious in a Baltimore gutter under mysterious circumstances; it is last time he was seen in public before his death.
- “Reading for this year’s anthology was as much a political act, and a way of taking a stand, as my writing.” Roxane Gay on what makes a story political in 2018. | Lit Hub
- Matthew Daddona talks to Diane Williams, beloved writer’s writer, and master of the (very) short story. | Lit Hub
- 23 women horror writers who are (almost) scarier than the patriarchy. | Lit Hub
- “I imagine him moving through the world apologizing for just being.” Nicole R. Fleetwood on raising a black son not to be afraid.| Lit Hub
- Leif Enger on the equalizing power of the kite (and why he never leaves home without one). | Lit Hub
- Ingrid Persaud’s debut story, “The Sop,” wins the BBC National Short Story Award. | Lit Hub
- “I’m in 221B Baker Street, the residence of Sherlock Holmes.But I’m not in London. I’m in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.” Rebecca Romney on the painstaking replication of Sherlockiana in real life. | CrimeReads
- This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Kristin Iversen on The Lover and the amorphous boundaries of the literary world. | Book Marks
- Book Marks and The Great American Read: Villains and Monsters. | Book Marks
- Wait, was Hemingway funny? Verna Kale on the dark humor in A Farewell to Arms. | BLARB
- “I’ve heard lots of criticism of what I’m doing,” she said. “I’ve been told these aren’t stories.” Rumaan Alam profiles Diane Williams, whose new Collected Stories has 784 pages of . . . stories. | The New York Times
- “I still remember that original encounter, how it felt like a flare from my own secret world, all the inchoate longings and obsessions of being a teen-ager somehow rendered into book form.” Emma Cline on The Virgin Suicides. | The New Yorker
- “Before #MeToo, I had not really understood the connection between power and sexual abuse.” What a Swedish professor learned from a month of reading only classic feminist texts. | The Guardian
- From Andrea Dworkin to Brittney Cooper, the books Rebecca Traister read while writing Good and Mad (and two she wishes she had). | The Cut
- Tayari Jones, Rachel Kushner, Kiese Laymon, Alexander Chee, and many more: the 2019 ALA Carnegie Longlists for fiction and nonfiction have been announced. | Andrew Carnegie
- Amazon is investing in literary fantasy adaptations, picking up Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens and ordering Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time. | The A.V. Club
Also on Lit Hub: Why strikes matter • A poem by Diana Khoi Nguyen • Read from White Dancing Elephants
