- “Each in her own way set out to adapt the Question of Love to her own bold and anarchic use”: Vivian Gornick on the romantic obsessions of Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, and Marguerite Duras. | Boston Review
- “Not one syllable of what Hemingway has written can or will be missed by any literate person in the world.” The Times offers a light retraction of some of their classic book pans. | The New York Times
- “This is the kind of writer we need in desperate times: someone who can go deep into the subjects we would rather not think about, with both investigative rigor and human pathos.” Read a profile of John Lanchester. | Vulture
- “Seriously he would come to your door, William, and beat you up.” Joyce Johnson on navigating the male literary egos of 20th-century New York. | Evergreen Review
- On Emily Chester, the most famous novel by a female writer that no one remembers (and it’s probably Henry James’s fault). | Written Out
- “A line of golden sparks shoots upward into the sky and ends in a colored point: first pink, then blue, then pink again, casting its brief hypnotic light on the sand and the water.” Read a new short story by Sally Rooney. | The New Yorker
- Wish more ghosts scratched at your windows? (And have an extra $1.62m collecting dust somewhere?) The house that inspired Wuthering Heights is for sale. | Lonely Planet
- “I do not want a Nancy Drew I can relate to. I want a Nancy Drew I can aspire to.” Joanna Greenberg is on the Case of the Perfect Girl Detective. | BLARB
- “Somehow, in the midst of a horrifying ordeal, Le Guin finds an incredible sweetness.” Charlie Jane Anders reflects on The Left Hand of Darkness at 50. | The Paris Review
- “This is the joy of Prince — all of him.” Read Hanif Abdurraqib’s introduction to Prince: The Last Interview. | EW
- News that’s as unsurprising as it is terrible: Trump’s 2020 budget proposal threatens to defund libraries. | Book Riot
- Women and small presses dominate this year’s Man Booker International Prize longlist, which includes a repeat appearance by last year’s co-winner, Olga Tokarczuk. Here are the 13 finalists. | The Man Booker Prize
- Why Alexandre Dumas, author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, considered his magnum opus to be a 1,150 page cookbook. | Atlas Obscura
- Phones, wikis, music, and accessibility: how the internet is changing our ability to preserve endangered languages. | The Outline
- “Each one is so uniquely unintelligible that, in the end, it doesn’t even make sense to compare them.” A dispatch from the brave masochist who read 13 campaign memoirs from 2020’s candidates. | The Baffler
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