TODAY: In 1947, Kenneth Arnold claims to have seen nine flying saucers near Mount Rainier, Washington, starting a huge amount of enthusiasm in science fiction writers and scientists.
- On Percival Everett’s “utter fearlessness in placing demands upon a reader combined with real compassion for ordinary people.” | n+1
- From Marx to Jane Jacobs, five amateurs and autodidacts whose work changed the world. | Verso
- On the intersection of “radical artistic thinking and obscure spiritual strivings” and the occult origins of the modernist movement. | The New Yorker
- “You are out of the way and grateful to be so, way uptown in a place no one has yet thought to blow up.” Short fiction by Sara Nović. | BOMB
- “They were towed to shore and charged with the crime of hope.” An excerpt from Blind Spot by Teju Cole. | VICE
- “Looking back, I think it was my mother’s highly dysfunctional way to tell me, to warn me, about what a man can be.” Sherman Alexie speaks with Terry Gross about his new memoir, You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me. | NPR
- Larissa Pham on a new collection of essays by Mary Gaitskill, who “uses compassion as a conduit for interpretation.” | The Nation
- She wrote as an enthusiast and a partisan: On the sexual anxieties and diaries of Susan Sontag. | Bookforum
- Revisiting Eve Merriam’s “frighteningly prophetic. . . personal condemnation of an administration,” The Nixon Poems. | The Awl
- “Any writer who is worth anything is outside for some reason.” A profile of What We Lose author Zinzi Clemmons. | Vogue
- On the long, varied, and occasionally sexist history of the beach read, a category with “no single, standard definition.” | Broadly
- Naomi Klein explains why she opted to publish her new book No is Not Enough with an independent press (and without an agent), rather than a bigger house. | Publishers Weekly
- Among all the things millennials are purportedly killing (napkins, golf, bars of soap, non-twist-off wine), there’s one thing they can’t be accused of ruining: libraries. | Pew Research Center
- A deeper and more human knowledge: Matthew Zapruder explains the value in writing—and teaching—poems. | PBS
- Tobias Carroll profiles The Sarah Book author Scott McClanahan, “a literary outsider in the vein of Flannery O’Connor or Harry Crews.” | Rolling Stone
10 famous book hoarders, from Karl Lagerfeld to Nigella Lawson · On a wonderful, beautiful, almost failed sentence by Virginia Woolf · Shorter, faster, better: On the beauty of literary compression · James Salter’s last interview, republished in full · 9 murderous tyrants who were also failed writers (and one okay poet) · After not finishing a book in 35 years, how my father became a reader · How Billie Holiday and Simone de Beauvoir invented cool · On the world’s first poet, who is revered by ancient alien conspiracy theorists—but few others · 22 of your favorite writers on what to read this summer
This week on Book Marks:
The book that shook the foundations of Latin American literature · Janet Maslin in The New York Times sees shades of Serpico in Don Winslow’s new crime novel · A 1992 Los Angeles Times review of Cloudstreet, one of Australia’s most beloved novels · The New Republic’s 1946 pan of Geroge Orwell’s Animal Farm · Charles Frazier’s National Book Award-winning Civil War epic, Cold Mountain, at 20 · A 1934 review of The Postman Always Rings Twice—James M. Cain’s sexually charged, hard-boiled crime novel · Crooked cops, Cold War spies, Martin Luther King, and more all feature in our Best Reviewed Books of the Week .
