TODAY: In 1924, Truman Capote is born.
- “My extended family presents a stark picture of what it is to live in a state, in a country, that does not think that access to quality physical and mental health care is a human right.” Jesmyn Ward on her Mississippi hometown. | Harper’s
- “It’s a gift of human consciousness that we know we’re going to die, but a limitation that we don’t know how it will happen.” Sarah Gerard on hurricanes. | The Baffler
- James Patterson and Bill Clinton’s forthcoming thriller The President Is Missing is set to be adapted by Showtime after a “high-stakes (and almost certainly high-dollar) bidding war.” | Vulture
- “I began to think of memoir as a form in which the very particular individual is dramatised, theatricalised, and fictionalised in some way.” Margo Jefferson on the cultural memoir (and 5 examples of the form). | Five Books
- On The Lonely Doll, the creepy, cult-classic children’s book that is also a favorite of Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and many other women artists. | The New Yorker
- “The cosmic bomb is to the H-bomb what an earthquake is to hiccups.” A newly discovered story by Kurt Vonnegut. | The Nation
- “I have no choice but to try and be a bridge between my white family and all the people like me who are terrified to be living and raising children in Trump’s America.” Nicole Chung on engaging with racism, both within her family and in broader America. | Longreads
- Climate change is a social justice issue too: Reading James Baldwin in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. | Ploughshares
- Dystopic soothsaying and interior murk: On the prescient fiction of J.G. Ballard. | Guernica
- “Before plot or dialogue or even character, the mind needs to be observant, nimble, playful, and curious around the world around it. Without that, fiction is DOA.” An interview with Her Body and Other Parties author Carmen Maria Machado. | The Millions
- “Stories of the erotic adventures of wayward spouses don’t hold the same appeal as they did in the 1960s.” On Richard Stern’s Other Men’s Daughters and divorce in the American novel. | Bookforum
- “It wasn’t just me reading under the covers anymore. Other people wanted to connect over these books.” How Glory Edim took Well-Read Black Girl from a homemade t-shirt to a literary movement. | Lenny
- Why are fiction writers of color always presumed to be writing about themselves? | The Awl
- How a group of “bookworms, retired librarians, grassroots organizers, [and] historic preservationists” saved the Mid-Manhattan Library. | The Nation
- “The concern did not lie with the murder, but instead with the murderess, a construct treated similarly to that of a deconstructed maiden or princess.” On Shirley Jackson and our collective obsession with female killers. | Electric Literature
10 magical feminist books to inspire creative resistance · 8 notable attempts to hack the New York Times bestseller list · Class, race and the case for genre fiction in the canon · Why we can’t ignore H.P. Lovecraft’s white supremacy · Selling books from William Faulkner’s first writing room · How Belt magazine is giving Midwesterners a chance to tell their own stories · What we can learn from reading about “ordinary” Nazis · On Difficult Women, the 1980s tell-all that scandalized literary London · On Louisa May Alcott, a difficult woman who got things done · On the four-foot tall, 18th-century Quaker who was one of America’s first abolitionists
This week on Book Marks:
25 years after its publication, a look back oat the first reviews of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient · Attica Locke’s tale of forbidden love and violent racism in an East Texas town · From 1963, Kingsley Amis on J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World · This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Sam Sacks of The Wall Street Journal · Elizabeth Hardwick on the elusive brilliance of Joan Didion · Stephen and Owen King’s small-town fantasy-horror, Sleeping Beauties, is “the Y-chromosome sibling to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland” · Back in 2010, Ron Charles hailed Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad as “a testament to the redemptive power of raw emotion” · Dunkirk, drug addiction, and more in the best-reviewed books of the week
