TODAY: In 1869, William Strunk Jr., an English Professor at Cornell University and author of The Elements of Style (1918) (later revised and expanded by his former student E. B. White) is born.
- 25 books that have shaped the LGBTQ literary genre over the past 20 years, from The Vagina Monologues to The End of Eddy. | The New York Times
- “I didn’t survive all the stuff you’re gonna read about in this book because of humility. . . I survived because I’ve been pissed off for 50 years.” An interview with Sherman Alexie. | BuzzFeed News
- Flamboyant hellfire never descended: On David Bowie’s dream of adapting 1984 in to a televised musical. | Rolling Stone
- Oprah has selected Imbolo Mbue’s 2016 novel Behold the Dreamers for her book club. “It’s got everything that’s grabbing the headlines in America right now,” she said. | Los Angeles Times
- “They wouldn’t have been able to explain why, but this was what held them spellbound: all her movements were as simple as possible and perfectly suited to her person.” A newly translated story by Italo Calvino. | The New Yorker
- “I am just so accustomed to thinking no one is going to approach my body with kindness.” Roxane Gay in conversation with Carmen Maria Machado. | Guernica
- “Renewal happens on every level. Nature rewiring itself, regreening and regrowing itself, with everyone involved in a sort of statewide coming out.” Marlon James on Minnesota summers. | Star Tribune
- How the American superrich have “empowered a new kind of thinker—the ‘thought leader’—at the expense of the much-fretted-over ‘public intellectual.’” | The New Republic
- “Why does an austere Swiss-German novelist like Hesse, even given his interest in what would’ve back then been called Oriental thought, have so much to say to Koreans?” On Korea’s love of Demian. | BLARB
- “As long you get the book’s meaning across …” Watching the Broadway première of 1984 with George Orwell’s son. | Vulture
- Philip Pullman has raised £32,400 for residents affected by the Grenfell Tower fire; a character in his next book will be named Nur Huda el-Wahabi after a student who died in the tragedy. | The Guardian
- We wept to be reminded of such color: Two poems by Tracy K. Smith. | The Nation
- “I enjoy working within traditional grids but I do feel like there is so much language of comics to explore.” An interview with Jillian Tamaki. | Hyperallergic
- Rosecrans Baldwin recommends works of New England noir, from Ethan Frome to Orson Welles’s The Stranger. | Work in Progress
- “Budgets cuts have shuttered more than 100 libraries across Britain already, and hundreds more are scheduled for execution.” On the impact of austerity on British libraries. | The Millions
I know this isn’t the kind of place you can write an essay about: The problem with writing about Florida · Never-before-published Hannah Arendt on what freedom and revolution really mean · Was Jane Eyre written as a secret love letter? · I had to meet her, plain and simple: Working as an assistant to Adrienne Rich · Can you really have a book club for 8 million people? On the inaugural One Book, One New York project · People are ready to vote for something, not just against it: An interview with Naomi Klein · How an oddball nerd hobby (Quidditch) grew into a semi-professional sport · The rise of women-only literary spaces, UK edition · On our fascination with missing girls and the bizarre lack of women in the room where it happens · Charles Simic literally writes in the dark: In conversation with a great American poet
This week on Book Marks:
The wizardy inside: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone turns 20 · From 1984, E.L. Doctorow on Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being · Back in 1957, The Nation Review panned Ayn Rand’s “excruciatingly awful” Atlas Shrugged · From The New York Times, Jennifer Egan on Nick Laird’s new novel of sectarian violence and buried secrets · “Between the music and the drugs, there is only horror”: on the 40th anniversary of its publication, a review of Michael Herr’s Dispatches · Toscanini, Naomi Klein, artificial intelligence, and more: the best-reviewed books of the week
