TODAY: In 1664, English poet and diplomat Matthew Prior takes his birthday as an opportunity to chastise the woman he loves for treating him with ‘scorn’ and denying him via a poem, “On My Birthday, July 21.”
- “We conjure a world that is worthy of us. And then we gather there: unbowed, unburied, unabashed in our joy.” Joshua Bennett on the places where Black life is lived. | Lit Hub
- How will future Mars explorers deal with the most challenging thing about life on the Red Planet? (Boredom.) | Lit Hub Science
- “Our disappointment with the natural world has to do with the fact that it no longer serves to reflect back our values and fears to us.” Colin Dickey on sea serpents, Dogmen, and the tensions between folklore and mainstream science. | Lit Hub Science
- “Who are we really trusting to deal with this contagion, this deadly virus? Please.” Jarvis Masters writes from death row in San Quentin as Covid-19 spreads unchecked. | Lit Hub Politics
- Why did Republicans abandon American idealism? Anne Applebaum on political and cultural despair. | Lit Hub Politics
- Ann and Jeff VanderMeer preview The Big Book of Modern Fantasy, the largest anthology of fantasy tales published since WWII. | Lit Hub
- Debra Jo Immergut recommends five books that bend and fold time, from Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills to Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing. | Book Marks
- Alexandra Burt on growing up in a Cold War hotspot and the murder that shattered her last illusions of shelter. | CrimeReads
- Why were writer and satirist Dorothy Parker’s ashes interred at the NAACP headquarters in Baltimore? And what will happen to them when the headquarters are moved to D.C.? | Forward
- Thriller writer Mark Dawson made No. 8 on the Sunday Times bestseller list with his newest book—after buying hundreds of copies himself. | The Guardian
- “Even just a few minutes, or a few paragraphs, keeps the world I’m creating, and the characters, there with me, day in and day out.” Jasmine Guillory makes a strong case for writing (at least a little) every day. | The Cut
- “Like a death in brackets:” A literary scholar on losing her mother to Covid-19 and reading Virginia Woolf. | Avidly
- Facing a “steady sales decline,” the future of Portland’s Powell’s City of Books is unclear. | OPB
- A recent fundraising campaign could make it possible for Dionne Sims to open Minnesota’s only Black-owned bookstore. | Mpls.St.Paul Magazine
- On teaching Pakistani literature to a group of old, white students in small-town America. | Dawn
Also on Lit Hub: On techno as a cure for writer’s block • Rumaan Alam and Jameson Fitzpatrick on sex, poetry, and textiles • Read an excerpt from Carlos Fonseca’s novel Natural History, trans. by Megan McDowell.