TODAY: In 1945, French author and poet Paul Valéry, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 12 different years, dies.
- “If I’m not willing to spend a few days journeying somewhere for something, it means it’s too far for that particular purpose.” Lydia Davis on the decision to not fly. | Lit Hub
- Yoko Ogawa, Masatsugu Ono, and more Japanese authors discuss their favorite Murakami short stories. | Lit Hub
- “It’s as if she has set up camp in the 14th century and is simply reporting what she finds there.” Charles Nicholl on the tenacious constancy of Iris Origo’s The Merchant of Prato. | Lit Hub
- Kirkland Hamill explores the disorienting, limiting world of New York’s social elite. | Lit Hub Politics
- “Everything urgent, everything necessary, happens among other people.” Guy Guratne on John Berger and writing as an act of distancing. | Lit Hub
- “It takes a few notes, a very few notes, to undo the bare bones of a person.” Two new poems by Ira Sadoff. | Lit Hub
- Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness, and more rapid-fire book recs from Chia-Chia Lin. | Book Marks
- Why Clueless, which turns 25 this week, is still our best and cleverest Jane Austen adaptation. Yes, according to everybody. | The A.V. Club, The Ringer
- The November elections are fast approaching. Take a look at a roundup of fall books on presidential elections, democracy, populism, voting and more. | Inside Higher Ed
- The Vietnam War marked a turning point in the development of the American war novel. Would the greatest war novels celebrate a national defense apparatus or decry questionable government policies? | The New Republic
- Rather than going digital amid the pandemic, one UK book festival will become a drive-in event, where the audience can tune in via radio (and applaud with horns and headlight). | The Guardian
- P Varavara Rao, the 81-year-old poet and activist who has been imprisoned in Mumbai for nearly 22 months, has tested positive for Covid-19. His family says he is being denied adequate medical care. | Scroll
- As the prospects for police reform or abolition in Minneapolis appear limited, some “are taking the job of public safety into their own hands.” | New York Review of Books
- “Every day, we received assignments for letters, counting, reading. Every day, we failed to do them.” Keith Gessen on the impossibility of distance learning with kids. | The New Yorker
Also on Lit Hub: How to write a timely novel in a world that won’t stop changing • Arra Lynn Ross on old Norse translations and decoding myths • Read an excerpt from Esther Kinsky’s novel Grove, trans. by Caroline Schmidt.