TODAY: In 1996, Oprah Winfrey launches her book club.
- The fall of men has been greatly exaggerated: Rebecca Solnit on Brett Kavanaugh, Jian Ghomeshi, and who’s allowed to tell the story. | Lit Hub
- “Can writing a book about cancer give you cancer? Apparently!” Shirley Barrett on being diagnosed with breast cancer after giving it to her protagonist. | Lit Hub
- “Hit em harder!” Hell Week with a Pee Wee football teamin Brownsville, Brooklyn, in the wake of Ferguson. | Lit Hub
- If Danez Smith’s introduction to Britteney Black Rose Kapri’s Black Queen Hoe doesn’t make you want to drop everything and read it, then our link must be dead. | Lit Hub
- “[T]hey did not need me to preach to them to read books.” Three decades after leaving Somalia, Ahmed Ismail Yusuf attends the Mogadishu Book Fair and finds a country of readers. | Lit Hub
- From Go Tell It on the Mountain to Just Above My Head, the first reviews of every James Baldwin novel. | Book Marks
- Eight crime novels that use the “deception, dishonesty and downright fakery” of social media to ratchet up the tension. | Crime Reads
- Former radio host Jian Ghomeshi, who was accused of sexual harassment and assault by more than 20 women in 2014 and 2015, has written a cover story for the New York Review of Books. Isaac Chotiner spoke to editor Ian Buruma about his decision to publish the essay. | Slate
- “The slow reader is like a swimmer who stops counting the number of pool laps they have done and just enjoys how their body feels and moves in water.” In defense of slow (and careful) reading. | The Guardian
- “So much storytelling about poverty is overlaid with this sense of pity and sometimes even condescension.” An interview with Heartland author and journalist Sarah Smarsh. | NPR
- The winners of the 2018 Dayton Literary Peace Prize in fiction and nonfiction have been announced. | Dayton Literary Peace Prize
- “She saw things most clearly when they were half-destroyed.” Joanne O’Leary on Maeve Brennan. | London Review of Books
- “Writing a screenplay is a way of really laying out the whole corpse and bringing it back to life in a different way.” Ian McEwan on The Children Act and adapting his own novels. | Deadline
- Target is facing criticism for censoring words like “transgender” and “Nazi” in the descriptions of books on its website. | Washington Post
Also on Lit Hub: Philip Metres on Khalil Gibran • On the challenges faced by the first black actors on TV • Read from The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish
