TODAY: In 1902, P. G. Wodehouse leaves his job at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Company in London to become a freelance writer.
- “A little ambition is best tempered by a little rejection, and perhaps more than a little editing.” Nick Ripatrazone weighs the pros and (mostly) cons of self-publishing poetry. | Lit Hub
- Lori Feathers in conversation with Lucy Ellmann, who was—until her recent Booker Prize nomination—“the greatest American novelist no one in America had heard of.” | Lit Hub
- “Genre is often the least interesting way to describe a work of art.” On Gormenghast, The Big Book of Fantasy, and the sci-fi and fantasy that defies easy categorization. | Lit Hub
- On the private moments that lead to a public movement: Honor Moore tells her #MeToo stories. | Lit Hub
- Brief interviews with imaginary friends (and the kids who love them). | Lit Hub
- “Paule Marshall is the literary foremother I love who didn’t always love me back.” Rosamond S. King on the contradictions of literary gratitude. | Lit Hub
- “This, then, is my territory: I operate at the interface where the criminal and the natural world interact.” Patricia Wiltshire on the nexus of forensics and ecology. | CrimeReads
- On the new crop of fiction about artificial intelligence—including Will Eaves’s Murmur, Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me—which asks whether fiction itself will survive AI. | Financial Times
- Author and editor James Atlas has died at the age of 70. | The Washington Post
- “No matter how far you run, he all but cackles, you’ll always be those scared kids.” A.A. Dowd on re-reading Stephen King’s It as an adult—and confronting his own childhood in the process. | A.V. Club
- Emails released as part of a lawsuit by Guy Snodgrass, former aide to Defense Secretary James Mattis, show that the Pentagon deliberately delayed his memoir. | Mother Jones
- “Queerness gives them hope that they can not only survive but flourish—by refusing to see themselves as strangers in the world.” Morgan Jerkins on Nicole Dennis-Benn’s and Ocean Vuong’s recent novels about queer characters affected by migration. | Longreads
- “Give us triangular books, you cowards!” we screamed, until we read this article about why books are rectangles. | Book Riot
- The son of the late detective fiction author Frederic Dannay didn’t realize that a batch of his father’s signed books had been stolen—until he saw that they were up for auction at Sotheby’s. | New York Post
Also on Lit Hub: Graphic novel: the true story of Granny Lee Ok-sun • What happened to the American citizen-soldier? A former US Army intelligence officer’s lessons from the Roman Republic • Read an excerpt from Linda Boström Knausgård’s novel Welcome to America (trans. Martin Aitken).
