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TODAY: In 1866 , in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Years Under the Sea, the steamer Governor Higginson encounters a mysterious sea creature five miles off the coast of Australia.

“The book itself opens, and closes, with life, continuing.” Michael Cunningham on the novel that would become Mrs Dalloway. | Lit Hub
Alt-right ideas have become “imaginable and utterable”; Alexandra Minna Stern looks at the pseudo-anthropologists who made it possible. | Lit Hub
Colson Whitehead as the steward of painful histories, Svetlana Alexievich’s enchanted naturalism, Chuck Klosterman’s curious fictions, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
Bookseller Scott Montgomery’s guide to Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire series (just in time for the Longmire Days fan fest in Wyoming). | CrimeReads
“I’ve been thinking about white male privilege, and I wonder if you think about yours or your son’s?” Claudia Rankine asks directly (and indirectly). | The New York Times Magazine
What it’s like to spend the night in Hunter S. Thompson’s writing cabin—which you can now rent on Airbnb. | The Guardian, Airbnb
“Walking ought to be among the most democratic of activities. Look closely at the genre, though, and you’ll find that the writer-walker has a way of claiming a surprisingly exclusive status.” On Beneath My Feet: Writers On Walking, and the essential smugness of writers who walk. | The Atlantic
“We write [these] stories to be cautionary tales, not instruction manuals.” Dystopian fiction writers discuss the dystopian immigration crisis. | The Washington Post
“Is it a good idea to invite someone into your home whose occupation it is to observe everything?” On the perils of the writer as houseguest. | The New York Times
“What is lost when a language disappears?” Four stories of Indigenous communities in California fighting to revitalize their languages. | Emergence Magazine
“Every generation is a bridge between something that’s past, and something that’s coming.” An interview with Wendell Berry. | The New Yorker
“She shocks with the truth: it runs like blood through her every sentence.” Deborah Levy on Elizabeth Hardwick’s “hard, glinting, sophisticated, switched-on female intelligence.” | The Paris Review
“What would happen to the global economy if all the women on the planet suddenly decided: I don’t care if you think I’m fuckable.” Laura Lippman on not dieting. | Longreads
Because the Summer of Scam is eternal (and because writing is the greatest scam of all), here’s a story about a conman turned true crime writer. | The Atlantic
Here’s the story of the tiny book that flew to the moon with Buzz Aldrin (and might still be there if it weren’t for those lunar sticklers at NASA). | The Boston Globe
From Ted Chiang stories to a Nnedi Okorafor trilogy, here are some books to get you excited about the moon landing anniversary—as if you needed any more reason. | Chicago Tribune
A collection of classic moon poems to read on the 50th anniversary of the first crewed moon landing this weekend. | Poets
“Even if we accept the idea that we all (or most of us) want to become clearer and more interesting writers, is grammar truly the key to such improvements?” Jonathan Russell Clark is against style guides—sort of. | Vulture
Good news for under-prepared travelers: a number of airport bookstores have a “read and return” program that will give you a 50% refund on a book purchased at one of their stores within six months. | Lifehacker