TODAY: In 1950, Edward P. Jones, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Known World, is born.
- Kazuo Ishiguro has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. | Literary Hub
- Meghan O’Rourke wishes we had a better literature of illness. | Literary Hub
- How Garnette Cadogan hid behind fictions to avoid abuse at home. | Literary Hub
- If your book presumes an entirely white world, it’s not universal: Sarah LaBrie on blackness and universality in fiction. | Literary Hub
- WATCH: Karl Ove Knausgaard deliver his Windham-Campbell lecture, Why I Write. | Literary Hub
- Jesmyn Ward writes toward the hauntings of history: a conversation with Michele Filgate. | Literary Hub
- “To read both these volumes is to feel, at least for a few hours, that one has lived, not merely intellectualized, Audre Lorde’s life.” Read a 1982 review of Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. | Book Marks
- Just in time for Halloween, you can now buy Exorcist author William Peter Blatty’s house—and of course, it’s haunted. | Los Angeles Times
- “If you isolate any single hypothesis or argument or statistic about the problem of college sexual assault, there will be some way to make it seem wrong,” Jia Tolentino examines the botched review of Vanessa Grigoriadis’s Blurred Lines. | The New Yorker
- “I’m always trying to look for words inside words. It’s so beautiful to me that the word laughter is inside slaughter.” A profile of Ocean Vuong. | The Guardian
- Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation isn’t only about eco-horror—it’s also about introversion. | Tor
- “We are amid two Syrians, one is old and full of memory but hasn’t seen his home in ‘First 20, then 30, then 40 years,’ and the other is young, has never been to his father’s home, but watches videos of its destruction on his smart phone.” Short fiction by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar. | Recommended Reading
- “He was very complicated in these ways, and he didn’t really care about the contradictions.” An interview with Muhammad Ali biographer Jonathan Eig. | NPR
- don’t you see / how the smoke melts / on to my right hand: a poem by Laura Buccieri. | Lambda Literary
Also on Lit Hub: How the Cold War snuck into midcentury records · On contemporary moral exhaustion, and a country in decline · Listen to a reading from Manhattan Beach, by Jennifer Egan.
