- “To Brooks, poetry was citizenship. In Chicago, her radicalism is at center stage.” Doreen St. Félix on the legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks. | The New Yorker
- It was, as they say, the end of an era: A report from the last party thrown in George Plimpton’s old apartment. | Vulture
- Writers there are creating something entirely new: On the rise of Korean crime fiction. | The Guardian
- “The New Vanguard”: 15 extraordinary books by 21st century women, including Rachel Kushner, Han Kang, and Jesmyn Ward, have been highlighted by the Times for Women’s History Month. | The New York Times
- “I went into a state of non-reality.” Three women have gone on the record about the accusations of sexual misconduct surrounding Sherman Alexie. | NPR
- “The male glance is the opposite of the male gaze. Rather than linger lovingly on the parts it wants most to penetrate, it looks, assumes, and moves on.” Lili Loofbourow on the ways we dismiss female work. | VQR
- The finalists for the Windham-Campbell Prizes, Lambda Literary Award, and Aspen Words Literary Prize have been announced. | Windham-Campbell, Lambda Literary, NPR
- Famed nature fanatic Thoreau was also, somewhat unsurprisingly, an obsessive land surveyor. | Places Journal
- “Tom rounds the corner as a charcoal-gray ghost. He’s gaunt in a way I never thought possible for a man his size.” Read an excerpt from Dan Sheehan’s Restless Souls. | Guernica
- Poet Lucie Brock-Broido has died at 61. Celebrate her life by reading some of her work. | USNews, JSTOR
- Jeremy Corbyn, Jason Isaacs, and dozens of other high-profile British men have joined a call first issued last International Women’s Day to construct a statue of Mary Wollstonecraft in London. | The Guardian
- Meet women writers and translators around the world who are “pressing for progress” through their literature and activism. | Words Without Borders
- The New York Times Magazine music issue is here, featuring Angela Flournoy on Big Shaq, Chelsea Hodson on Lana Del Rey, Hanif Abdurraqib on Julien Baker, and more. | The New York Times Magazine
- “The books we read in childhood, having purloined them from some shelf supposed to be inaccessible, have something of the unreality and awfulness of a stolen sight of the dawn coming over quiet fields where the household is asleep.” From 1916, a Virginia Woolf dispatch on the love of reading. | The Times Literary Supplement
- “Drawn to this sentence by its sexiness, we stay for its wild construction.” Abby Norwood on Joyce Carol Oates’s Black Water. | Tin House
Vita Sackville-West wrote a very, very tiny real book for the Queen’s dollhouse • 30 books for the 10 countries Americans visit the most (not including Russia) • On the pulp illustrations of Edward Hopper, before he became a famous painter of quiet streets and empty rooms • Among the wilder things: Aminatta Forna on life in the city with the foxes and coyotes • The transcendent humanity of the worst cruise I have ever taken: Ramona Ausubel tries—and fails—to find her ancestral sealegs • Why do writers keep multiple copies of books around? Melissa Febos, Carmen Maria Machado, John Sayles and more on their beloved editions • For your consideration: five writers who should be canonized as feminist saints (because we like the sound of the Feast Day of Saint Maya) • Is such a thing as an ethical reality TV show even possible? And what would that looks like, wonders Eric Thurm • The mysterious onstage origins of Van Morrison’s legendary album, Astral Weeks • An interview with the great Rachel Ingalls, who definitely should have won an Oscar for Mrs. Caliban • How I became a Jane Austen superfan (and lived to write about it) • Fiction/Non/Fiction: Jim Shepard and Danielle Evans talk gun violence, #neveragain, and the power of student protest • Why do we still buy mass-produced souvenirs? A deep dive into the mini Eiffel Tower economy • Why American progressives should read a classic Czech novel: In praise of The Good Soldier Svejk • Why is a Harvard business professor studying independent bookstores? • Hilary Mantel: “We still work to a man’s timetable and a man’s agenda.” • The complexities of designing a new cover of an old classic: Kimberly Glyder reimagines Gone With the Wind • Curtis White: Even postmodernism’s most famous practitioners were pretty damn confused about it
Also on Book Marks:
From F. Scott Fitzgerald to Joan Didion, 5 Hollywood novels that capture the dark and chaotic side of Tinseltown • Cops, Cloudbursts, and Census Takers all feature in the 5 Books Making News This Week This Week • Secrets of the Book Critics: Tampa Bay Times Book Editor Colette Bancroft on The Big Sleep, the Florida Experience, and 30 Years of Reviewing Books • As part of the 30 Books in 30 Days, NBCC President Kate Tuttle on Edmund Gordon’s “heroine quest” biography of Angela Carter • Gabe Habash on Thomas McGuane, Parul Sehgal on Jesse Ball, and more Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week • Luis Alberto Urrea, Smoketown stories, Angels in America, and more all feature in our Best Reviewed Books of the Week
