TODAY: In 1952, author bell hooks is born
  • “I can think of no other non-fiction book that evokes more successfully the special taste and feeling of a game and the men who play it.” Read a 1967 review of George Plimpton’s book of immersive football journalism, Paper Lion. | Book Marks
  • “My extended family presents a stark picture of what it is to live in a state, in a country, that does not think that access to quality physical and mental health care is a human right.” Jesmyn Ward on her Mississippi hometown. | Harper’s
  • “It’s a gift of human consciousness that we know we’re going to die, but a limitation that we don’t know how it will happen.” Sarah Gerard on hurricanes. | The Baffler
  • James Patterson and Bill Clinton’s forthcoming thriller The President Is Missing is set to be adapted by Showtime after a “high-stakes (and almost certainly high-dollar) bidding war.” | Vulture
  • “Whenever he caught himself thinking of Charles, he flinched and felt the table shift a little, as if he’d fallen asleep at the wheel and come to just before driving off the road.” Short fiction by Brandon Taylor. | Joyland
  • How Armed Services Editions—softcover books designed especially to fit in soldiers’ pockets during WWII—finally made the mass market paperback popular in America. | Atlas Obscura
  • “The concrete edifice rocked back and forth dementedly, heavily, impossibly.” Francisco Goldman’s personal history of Mexico City, in earthquakes. | The New Yorker
  • “There’s nothing inherently exciting about any narrative move: it’s only exciting if it works . . . Everything else is gimmickry.” A profile of Jennifer Egan. | The Guardian

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