TODAY: In 2006, Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road is published.
- Why we can’t ignore H.P. Lovecraft’s virulent white supremacy. | Literary Hub
- 8 notorious attempted hacks of the New York Times bestseller list. | Literary Hub
- Gabrielle Bellot on the paradoxical power of the hurricane, harbinger of death and love · Escaping Hurricane Irma in the safety of door-stopping book. | Literary Hub
- On the origins of The Little Prince (and getting Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s plane in the air). | Literary Hub
- This guy deserves a statue: on the greatest, loudest, toughest abolitionist you’ve never heard of. | Literary Hub
- A recently-uncovered “500-word sermonlike meditation” by George Moses Horton, the first African-American to publish a book in the South, demonstrates how he “constantly tried to write his way to some semblance of freedom, even when it was legally denied him”. | The New York Times
- “I’ve come to feel that the best thing I can share with readers is not dazzling argumentation, or references to the classics, but those moments we all know when we sit, helpless, before ravenous flames”: Pico Iyer on solitude and becoming a writer. | Granta
- “I began to think of memoir as a form in which the very particular individual is dramatised, theatricalised, and fictionalised in some way.” Margo Jefferson on the cultural memoir (and 5 examples of the form). | Five Books
- Climate change is a social justice issue too: Reading James Baldwin in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. | Ploughshares
- “To recall moments of prison history is to refuse the obliteration of narratives regarding state violence.” How poetry addresses mass incarceration. | Harriet
- Literary takes on the lives of animals, from Joy Williams to Haruki Murakami. | Electric Literature
- “Why not have the best sleep of your life next to the dried-out sack of daddy you’ve long taken for granted, whose wand no longer glows and quivers for you and for whom you no longer quietly melt?” A short story by Ben Marcus. | The New Yorker
- “Like coral, Ondaatje’s narrative is built up slowly into towers and branches and hidden chambers, fashioning a delicate grisaille of memory and passion.” A look back at the early reviews of The English Patient on the 25th anniversary of its publication. | Book Marks
Also on Lit Hub: From Meghan O’Rourke’s collection, Sun in Days · Five Books Making News: Jenny Erpenbeck, Daniel Mendelsohn and more · From Panio Gianopoulos’s new collection, How to Get Into Our House and Where We Keep the Money.
