TODAY: In 1836, American author, journalist, and explorer Fitz Hugh Ludlow, best known for his autobiographical book The Hasheesh Eater, is born.
- Did a revolution in Latin American publishing make One Hundred Years of Solitude the success it is today? | Lit Hub
- When in doubt, smile like an axolotl: Aimee Nezhukumatathil writes in praise of the “Mexican Walking Fish,” the cutest creature on planet earth. | Lit Hub Nature
- “The master who had played to stadia and venues across the world settled on a tatty old chair as if in his own living room, which in a way this was.” Ed Vulliamy at a B.B. King “show” in Indianola, Mississippi. | Lit Hub Music
- “I couldn’t write a book so concerned with American land without conjuring its history.” Diane Cook imagines life post climate change. | Lit Hub
- “Arabella’s world is a rhapsody of self-invention, bringing to mind the heat of Mary Gaitskill heroines, but layered with slapstick exploits, whodunit plotlines, and excessive screen time.” Durga Chew-Bose in conversation with Michaela Coel. | Garage
- Jane Austen was not fucking around about homeschooling, or why this fall is the perfect time to read Mansfield Park. | Avidly
- “There is a history behind all of our decisions–and we should make them with the full consciousness of what that history is.” Claudia Rankine on publishing Just Us into the current world. | TIME
- Check out a “slow culture” exhibit at six international venues that will reveal various poems exposed to UV light, very slowly, over the next 50 years. | Glasgow Live
- Break open your piggy banks, another literary dream house is for sale: the 16th-century home that inspired Emily Brontë’s vision of Wuthering Heights. | BBC
- Robert Hass on the classics of North American environmental writing and Gary Snyder’s exploration of our relationship to land. | The Paris Review
- J. Hoberman on Stephen Berkman, the “antiquarian avant-garde,” and why artists invent other artists. | New York Review of Books
