TODAY: In 1851, the first issue of The New-York Daily Times, later known as The New York Times, is published.
- “Everything I leave behind me is to be burned unread and to the last page.” How Max Brod really didn’t listen to Kafka. | Lit Hub
- “Cover design is mostly reading.” Designer Roman Muradov on the challenges of creating a cover for a forgotten modernist classic. | Lit Hub
- “Hers is a story that remains in the gaps despite the fact she was widely influential.” Imani Perry delves into the art and influence of Lorraine Hansberry. | Lit Hub
- Nonbinary wolves and loud-mouthed pink dogs: Lisa Hanawalt’s subversive, feminist, horse-centric Western, Coyote Doggirl. | Lit Hub
- A literary tour of the island where more books per capita are published than anywhere else in the world. | Lit Hub
- “Is Donald Trump an actual human being, or more of an unholy wraith that America has brought upon itself?” Ben Fountain on five books that explore American history. | Book Marks
- “The Friends of Eddie Coyle may not have been the first crime novel set in Boston, but it’s the first one that matters.” How George V. Higgins invented the Boston crime novel. | Crime Reads
- An admittedly premature attempt at defining a 21st century literary canon, including at least one true fact: that Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai is the best book of the century. | Vulture
- “Challenging as the ascension of e-commerce may be, it has served to remind many consumers of the joys of bookstore browsing.” How bookstores are finding new ways to thrive in the Amazon age. | Crain’s
- “The kind of stuff that wins the Prix Goncourt is not the thing I’m interested in translating . . . I’m attracted to books that are doing something different from the mainstream and getting overlooked.” An interview with translator Emma Ramadan. | BOMB
- Roald Dahl’s friend and longtime illustrator Quentin Blake has imagined what Matilda would be getting up to at 30 in a series of new sketches. | The Guardian
- “New York in the 80s. The phrase brims with myths—about art and finance, AIDS and real estate, right-wing schadenfreude and a jagged avant-garde.” Tobi Haslett on a new edition of Gary Indiana’s debut novel, Horse Crazy. | The Paris Review
- “If you fear asymmetry, read no further.” On Vanessa Bell’s modernist book covers. | SPINE
- “i drank a lot. i lost my job. i lived like nothing mattered.” Read a poem from Leonard Cohen’s forthcoming collection The Flame: Poems Notebooks Lyrics Drawings. | The New Yorker
Also on Lit Hub: Pop culture’s apocalypse obsession • Our fall nonfiction preview (history and biography edition) • Read from The Golden State
