TODAY: In 1905, English writer Mary Renault, best known for her historical novels set in ancient Greece and vivid fictional portrayals of Theseus, Socrates, Plato and Alexander the Great, is born.
- Gary Shteyngart has content coming out of his pores (and other revelations). | Lit Hub
- A taxonomy of college roommates, based on their taste in books (including why all 18-year-old Joyceans are secret grifters) | Lit Hub
- Why treating John Ashbery’s poetry as a series of puzzles to be solved is missing the point. | Lit Hub
- From The Souls of Black Folk to The New Jim Crow, One Person, No Vote author Carol Anderson spoke to Jane Ciabattari about her favorite books on democracy and its challenges. | Book Marks
- Steve Bannon, in conversation with David Remnick, was announced as the headliner of the New Yorker Festival Sunday morning—only for the event to be cancelled several hours later after pushback from staff, readers, and other festival participants. | Vulture
- “I can’t help feeling that I am not a very important person, and being treated like one gives me strange feelings.” A profile of Sally Rooney. | The New York Times
- Can’t wait to read the next Han Kang novel? Too bad, because she’s going to bury it in a Norwegian forest for the next century. | The Guardian
- “Her novels are a gift, for children and adults.” Brian Philips on the magic of Joan Aiken, one of the 20th century’s best children’s book authors. | The New Yorker
- How HBO’s new take on Sherlock Holmes—”young, female, Japanese, and wearing stilettos—injects Holmes’s old white corpse with new energy.” | The New Republic
- “If the purpose of the scene is to evoke a sense of sadness in a writer, I feel that is more challenging than making them laugh or smile.” An interview with Patrick DeWitt. | Electric Literature
- A unique intervention into the literature of war memory: On Tadao Tsuge’s manga interpretations of post-surrender Japan. | The New York Review of Books
Also on Lit Hub: Bill Cunningham’s Paris • A poem by Brandon Shimoda • From A Key to Treehouse Living
