- “Until recently, you were likelier to have seen a snow leopard in Manhattan than to meet Kakutani in the wild.” Wandering through the East Village with Michiko Kakutani. | Vulture
- “Microfilm machines trained people’s eyes to read differently.” An ode to microfilm and the analog archive. | The Atlantic
- “I asked him all those questions you’re not supposed to ask.” Lauren Markham, Jennifer Percy, and Sarah Smarsh discuss the art of interviewing. | Longreads
- Garnette Cadogan on soccer, “a world game not because of the millions drawn to watch the World Cup, but because of the millions for whom the game is alive every day on the street, tournament or none.” | New York Review of Books
- “Words have power, and especially in the realm of beauty, how we speak about ourselves is important. To have a crease was natural. To have a crease was to look real.” Crystal Hana Kim on makeup and monolids. | NYLON
- Ghosts. Death. Accidents. Violence. Sick parents. Marriage. Florida. Tourism. Planes. Hotels. Cameras. Horror films. Misogyny. Secrets: All this and more in an interview with Laura van den Berg. | The Paris Review
- “In pretty much any fiction I write, I do a lot of reading out loud to help me determine whether the sound is working.” R.O. Kwon on the musicality of language and taking inspiration from Edith Wharton. | The Atlantic
- Is Nico Walker’s Cherry “the first great novel of the opioid epidemic”? | Vulture
- Dispatches from the 5th annual David Foster Wallace conference, which sounds a lot more interesting than “40 men in bandanas talking over each other.” | The Outline
- “I wound up with what I thought was just this massive failure of a project that was years in the making.” Nick Drnaso on Sabrina and his unlikely journey to becoming the first graphic novelist longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. | Vulture
- “No, no, no, she sang. She wouldn’t go to rehab. Instead, she was doing this.” Leslie Jamison remembers Amy Winehouse on the 7th anniversary of her death. | Longreads
- Can an “architectural ugly duckling” be a historical landmark? That’s the question at the center of the fight to save Walt Whitman’s sole surviving New York City home. | Gothamist
- The long-rumored existence of missing chapters from The Autobiography of Malcolm X was confirmed this week when they were included as part of an auction in New York this week. | The New York Times
- “You’ve got to move to Brooklyn, all of our friends are moving to Brooklyn.” Jonathan Lethem, Alexander Chee, Elissa Schappell and other writers on their city as literary capital. | Electric Literature
- “I breathe. I remain. I remember that Mississippi is not only its ugliness.” Jesmyn Ward on moving back home. | TIME
Also on Lit Hub:
What would Anton Chekhov think of Vladimir Putin? Boris Fishman has some ideas • In praise of “plain heroines.” Why Katherine Chen loves Mary Bennett most of all • What language do I think in? Do I write in? Arundhati Roy on the politics of language and translation in India • “What is there to say of the end? It was as I had imagined, but worse, because it was real.” What it is to love an old dog • Saving art from the Soviet regime: at a secret museum in the Uzbek desert • As the world burns, what future is there for America’s desert cities? (The high in Phoenix today will be 114 degrees) • Is autofiction a dirty word? Edy Poppy talks to Siri Hustvedt about love, sex, and boredom • For Fiction/Non/Fiction, Alice Bolin and Kristen Martin talk about the problem with dead girl stories. With Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan • Dear grammar purists: your word snobbery is based on an intellectual Ponzi scheme • From Aldous Huxley’s work on Pride and Prejudice to Dunne-Didion-Dunne, 13 literary writers who’ve adapted the books of others for the screen • “I frequently find myself questioning the very base of what I do.” An English teacher comes to terms with the question: What is literature, anyway? • Which came first, the color or the fruit? On the unlikely etymology of the word “orange” • When it comes to writing, there is such a thing as talent: Elizabeth Hardwick telling it like it is • “Black Canadians do not actually come from outer space.” David Chariandy on Drake, Austin Clarke and an unsung outpost of the Caribbean diaspora
Best of Book Marks:
To mark what would have been the 130th birthday of the patron saint of Los Angeles noir, we took a look back at the first reviews of every Raymond Chandler novel • The author of Immigrant, Montana, Amitava Kumar, shared his list of five books about finding love • This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: New Republic culture writer Josephine Livingstone on The Canterbury Tales, Ismail Kadare, and literary subtweeting • Philip Marlowe in Mexico, Sean Spicer the gaslighter, guerrilla war on prudery, and more of the Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week • A vanished boyfriend, the conservative conquest of Wisconsin, and the tragedy of Altamont all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week
New on CrimeReads:
Lyndsay Faye examines the politics of Sherlock Holmes, and celebrates the great detective’s irreverance • John D. MacDonald’s best quotes on life, literature, and the meaning of it all • Sarah Weinman investigates the bizarre mid-century Brooklyn scam that inspired Himes’ A Rage in Harlem • J. Kingston Pierce looks at the many crime writers crafting new stories for Chandler’s iconic detective • How Borges, Bioy Casares, and their small publishing house brought detective fiction to Argentina and changed the course of a literary culture • July’s best international crime fiction • Gray Basnight delivers a brief history of cryptography in crime fiction, from doomsday ciphers to Sherlockian codes • Linda Castillo recommends six mysteries set in closed societies • James Lovegrove on Sherlock Holmes’ many encounters with the supernatural • Paul French looks at the hardboiled crime fiction of Central Asia • A close reading of Mary Higgins Clark as a guide to dealing with terrible men, from Becca Schuh • Flynn Berry investigates the aristocratic murderer whose escape from charges divided 1970s Britain
