TODAY: In 1897, William Faulkner is born in New Albany, Mississippi.
- Surrounded by 11 acres of guns, Ben Fountain reports from the NRA’s annual convention. | Lit Hub
- A conversation with Deborah Eisenberg, in which we learn why she is “the Gerald Ford of fiction writers.” | Lit Hub
- Of Nietzsche and the horse: John Kaag on life, death, and the temporary pathos of distance. | Lit Hub
- William Faulkner: two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, all-time worst postmaster. | Lit Hub
- Why Gordon Lish’s influence lives on most powerfully in his lineage of Jewish American writing. | Lit Hub
- Waiting for Eden author Elliot Ackerman shares his five favorite books that straddle life and death. | Book Marks
- Anna Lee Huber recommends 10 historical crime novels featuring women in espionage, because women make the best (fictional) spies. | CrimeReads
- “Instead of a theory of male anger, we have a growing literature in essays and now books about female anger, a phenomenon in transition.” Rebecca Solnit on three new books about women’s anger. | The New Republic
- “The point, she’s saying, is to last, to make love a habit, a collaboration that regenerates itself by doing.” Hilton Als on Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. | The New Yorker
- Watch filmmaker Paul Szynol’s short documentary on Donald Hall, who died this June at the age of 89. | The Atlantic
- “We know, down in the paragraph where people are commenting, what they like about it. We’re able to say, ‘Look, here’s where we think Season 1 should end.’” How the writing platform Wattpad is quickly becoming a literary (and film, and TV) agency. | Forbes
- Leslie Jamison on the summer she spent writing a budget travel guide for Wales, “traveling alone, living out of a dirty backpack, ill-equipped for the gig, still somewhat terrified by the idea of talking to strangers.” | The New York Times
- “From a fairly early age I’ve seen the fabric between death and life as a little bit porous.” Sarah Ruhl and Elizabeth Metzger on grief, correspondence, and Max Ritvo. | BOMB
- From folk paintings to an exquisite corpse by Leonora Carrington, a brief tour through Diane Williams’ art collection. | The Paris Review
Also on Lit Hub: How Ken Krimstein rendered Hannah Arendt’s life as a cartoon • The uncanny allure of monkeys in fiction • Read from The Collected Short Stories of Diane Williams
