TODAY: In 1956, The First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists meets at the Sorbonne in Paris. Organized by the publishing house Présence africaine, the Congress featured speakers Richard Wright, Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon.
- Aminatta Forna confronts the realities of walking in three different cities: London, Freetown, and New York. | Lit Hub
- “Indelible and unfinished.” Elizabeth Metzger on putting together Max Ritvo’s last collection of poetry. | Lit Hub
- Our love of true stories has destroyed our sense of truth. Rebecca Wolff on Octavia Butler, digital emptiness, and the unreality of the end times. | Lit Hub
- Shane Bauer draws a straight line from Texas’s private prisons back to its slave plantations. | Lit Hub
- An African sci-fi reading list that proves the genre isn’t “rising”—it has risen. | Lit Hub
- Sarah Weinman looks at Vladimir Nabokov’s public disdain for—and private enjoyment of—mystery stories. | Crime Reads
- The Great American Read: “Who Am I?”—classic reviews of America’s most beloved coming-of-age novels, from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to The Catcher in the Rye. | Book Marks
- This Week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Maris Kreizman on Lorrie Moore, Multi-Focus Critics, and the Dangers of Goodreads. | Book Marks
- “What did we have on that day? We must have looked like maniacs.” On going to Mexico City to find Leonora Carrington and asking her to be a death guide. | The Paris Review
- Before you see the new biopic, get to know the outrageous, unconventional French writer Colette. | Shondaland
- “I still get lonely, get sad often, but the difference is now I can point to all these luminaries in the world who are saying, ‘I was there too, and I made this art because of it.’” Kaveh Akbar and Danez Smith in conversation. | Granta
- Tara Isabella Burton on the “fragile, mournful beauty” of Bratislava, Slovakia. | The Wall Street Journal
- “I’d been a studious child and then a lazy adolescent, but after my mother died I began to treat various kinds of writing as if they promised an escape route from the unexamined horror that had overtaken my family.” Brian Dillon on reading and writing out from under depression. | Slate
- Tana French, Gary Shteyngart, Kiese Laymon, and more on books to look out for this fall. | Vulture
- “The great paradox of Finck’s life, of course, is that she makes work about her out-of-tune-ness, but it resonates enormously with other people.” A profile of cartoonist Liana Finck. | Vogue
Also on Lit Hub: “Today I Told Donald Trump”: new poetry by Erica Dawson • How to teach the joy of reading • Read from Poso Wells
