TODAY: In 1908, novelist Ann Petry, the first black woman writer with book sales topping a million copies for her novel The Street, is born.
- “A demand for conclusions is an expression of a desperate hope to hoard love for the future, which will be marked by loss.” Aleksandar Hemon on endings. | Lit Hub
- The world’s most beautiful bird can be found in Yellowstone National Park. | Lit Hub Nature
- “The willingness to allow pulp stories to be so delectably camp, not to pull any punches with their explorations of existentialism and sexuality, is inextricable from the genre’s overarching refusal to exist in the straight lines of conventional fiction.” Isa Arsén in praise of pulp fiction. | Lit Hub Craft
- The editor of Bad Form on the necessity of literary magazines in the face of financial struggles | The Guardian
- “What if pulpy absurdity is a good way to predict the future?” Margret Grebowicz profiles pulp sci-fi master Terry Bisson. | The New Yorker
- Dan Sinykin traces the surprisingly short history of “literary fiction.” | The Nation
- Book banning is getting even stupider: “A public library system in Alabama flagged a children’s book as potentially ‘sexually explicit; because the author’s last name is ‘Gay.’” | NBC News
- “A prodigiously gifted writer, one with many quivers in her bow.” Daphne Merkin on Helen Garner. | The New York Times
Also on Lit Hub: Martin Goodman considers what it means to write about the Holocaust • Fancy Feast on beauty, pleasure and sexual self-actualization.
