TODAY: In 1930, Collins Crime Club, an imprint of British book publishers William Collins, Sons, is launched. Throughout its 64 years, the club issued a total of 2,025 first editions of crime novels.
- “I’ve never had much talent for making things up.” An interview with Chris Kraus. | The Guardian
- How Western literature evolved from cold recitations of actions to “stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities.” | Nautilus
- What is the place of culture in the midst of injustice and terror? On Haitian revolutionary writer Marie Vieux-Chauvet. | Public Books
- “As France has braced itself for the possibility of a Le Pen Presidency, Louis’s book has become the subject of political discussion in a way that novels rarely do.” Garth Greenwell on Édouard Louis’s novel, The End of Eddy. | The New Yorker
- Words Without Borders and The Scofield have new issues, featuring writing about international food and Conrad Aiken and consciousness, respectively. | Words Without Borders, The Scofield
- You’re either a mother or a bitch: On Deborah Nelson’s new book, Tough Enough, which explores the unsentimental approach of Hannah Arendt, Joan Didion, and Susan Sontag, among others. | Chronicle of Higher Education
- The spending bill that Congress is expected to vote on this week has undone Trump’s original proposed cuts to the NEA and NEH. | Los Angeles Times
- “I feel like the publishing industry had its first opportunity to fight the Trump administration and it failed miserably.” Melville House’s Dennis Johnson and Julia Felischaker on Amazon, picking fights, and social media. | The Verge
- “I would give my mom glasses of prosecco and then read scenes out loud to her, which often resulted in her becoming totally hysterical.” An interview with Patricia Lockwood. | Chicago Review of Books
- “My nudity wasn’t transactional; I didn’t give it away, and it wasn’t taken from me, either.” Edan Lepucki on posing nude for photographers as a young woman. | ELLE
- “Our parasite was a new and mysterious development. It was gross, but it gave us something to talk about.” Short fiction by Jess Arndt. | Recommended Reading
- “It occurred to me that I was instead watching a seven-hour-long orgy of violence against women—promoted and marketed as high-minded, politically astute popular entertainment.” Is The Handmaid’s Tale adaptation Not Feminist? | NYRB
- Jarett Kobek on the weirdly authoritarian impulse embedded in the Internet, the many tragedies of the teenage boy, and the (potential) artistry of video games. | The Millions
The many ways in which we are wrong about Jane Austen · The Chinese factory workers who write poems on their phones · Reading Houellebecq in the midst of the French elections · Jillian Tamaki, Amelia Gray, and more: 15 books to read this May · How inequality shortens lifespans · The forgotten history of American working-class literature · On the vital importance of the NEH and the NEA, which saved literature in Tennessee · In which Scaachi Koul realizes that new clothes won’t fix her · Families are living in chronic cyclical poverty: Joe Halstead goes home to coal country · My mysterious mother: Beauty queen, rebel leader, national icon · What I’d Die For You tells us about Fitzgerald’s troubled final years
This week on Book Marks:
Lorrie Moore on Margaret Atwood’s genetically engineered nightmare · The Los Angeles Times on Jeff VanderMeer’s pots-apocalyptic fantasy Borne · From 1999, Stephen King on Hannibal Lector: “the greatest fictional monster of our time” · In her new book of career and life advice, Ivanka Trump “makes Sheryl Sandberg look like Rosa Luxemburg” · Back in 1965, The New York Times called out the Faulkner imitation in Cormac McCarthy’s first novel · The Book Marks Top 5: the best reviewed books of the week
