TODAY: In 1977, Chimamanda Adichie is born.
- “When I’m telling a story I imagine the eavesdropper over my shoulder.” Walter Mosley on storytelling, writing advice, and Winnie the Pooh. | Lit Hub
- “A fact is a wan thing without interpretation. The same facts are often marshaled to prove wholly contradictory arguments.” Siri Hustvedt on how easily we’ve been mesmerized by Trump’s norm-breaking rhetoric. | Lit Hub Politics
- “A good court—maybe this is the definition of a good court—helps you witness the catalog, the encyclopedia, of tendernesses it is.” Ross Gay has written possibly the definitive ode to the pick-up basketball court. | Lit Hub Sports
- “The United States was among the last nations to welcome the Last Million for resettlement.” David Nasaw on the search for a home for the last refugees of World War II. | Lit Hub History
- “By putting on that tail and giving into the fantasy, I learned a few things about living everyday life.” Lara Ehrlich on what becoming a mermaid taught me about being a modern woman. | Lit Hub Memoir
- How fiction reckons with a world in perpetual crisis: a conversation between Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum and Karen Russell. | Lit Hub
- In case you need reminding, a book is not a baby: Ayden LeRoux on abandoning the ubiquitous language of parenting. | Lit Hub
- For the 2021-22 school year, the University of Chicago’s English department, one of the top-rated in the US, will only accept students “interested in working in and with Black Studies.” | The University of Chicago
- The Irish Department of Education is considering removing classic literary texts like To Kill a Mockingbird from secondary school curricula after pro-Black Lives Matter families complained about the use of the n-word in classrooms. | Irish Central
- Is Walt Whitman, exemplary poet of a politically divided US, once again the writer of our moment? | The New York Times
- “There’s a part of me that feels the loss is incalculable. What if there was something in one of those crushed boxes that would have transformed literary criticism forever?” On the university that accidentally put Nadine Gordimer’s library on the street. | The Paris Review
- Here’s how publishers based in the West are responding to a difficult, destructive fire season. | Publishers Weekly
- “I had to convince the reader at various times that what I was writing was real, and yet I’m calling it a novel.” Ayad Akhtar on using autobiographical material in his book Homeland Elegies. | NPR
- Reading Michael Cohen’s Disloyal as a memoir of jilted love. | The New Yorker