TODAY: In 1888, the first issue of National Geographic Magazine is published; it contained no photographs and cost 50 cents.
- Where are all the gay rural poets? Bruce Snider on the search for writing that reflected his own experience. | Literary Hub
- What quilting, knitting, and embroidery can teach writers about narrative form. | Literary Hub
- The lives of trans men at the turn of the 20th century reveal “a far more complicated vision of the American past than the one historians have previously accepted.” | Literary Hub
- “When I served chocolate cupcakes enriched with Guinness to my dirtbag friends, I was transformed momentarily into someone better and more confident”: Emily Gould on her obsession with domestic goddesses. | The Cut
- “You can get a book anywhere. . . An archive exists in one location.” Meeting the “most interesting man in the world,” the New York Public Library archivist Thomas Lannon. | The Village Voice
- Black bodies are piling up, in life and literature: On the importance of narratives of black vitality. | Electric Literature
- “Fiction, so suggestive in describing bureaucracy from the outside, turned out to be a rather poor guide to bureaucracy from within.” On coming to understand bureaucracies through writing a book about them. | The Boston Review
- The latest chapter in the Lionel Shriver cultural appropriation saga includes paper dolls, a libertarian magazine, and the quote “there is nothing overtly offensive about wearing a straw hat that keeps out the sun.” | The New Republic
- The worse I did socially, the better I did at Latin: On the joys of studying Latin in high school (and beyond). | The Paris Review
- A new Black Mirror anthology, featuring Cory Doctorow, Claire North, and others, will pose dark questions about our relationship to technology, such as: what if a TV show were actually a book? | Tor
- Looking back at the first reviews of Fight Club, “a dark and disturbing book that dials directly into youthful angst and will likely horrify the parents of teens and twentysomethings.” | Book Marks
And on Literary Hub: Ethan Nichtern on how his love for The Princess Bride led him to Buddhism • Read an excerpt from Tod Goldberg’s novel Gangster Nation
