TODAY: In 1888, John Crowe Ransom, poet, critic, and founder of the Kenyon Review, is born.
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“To see his name behind one you hadn’t heard of was to be vouched for in the most essential way.” Lauren Cerand remembers Giancarlo DiTrapano. | Lit Hub
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Leidy Klotz probes the cultural origins of our need to add, starting with Truman’s post-war inauguration speech. | Lit Hub
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Genki Ferguson expands on our understanding of objectophiliacs, those who hold sexual or romantic attraction towards inanimate objects. | Lit Hub
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Here’s your astrology-based book recommendations for May, featuring reads by Stacey Abrams, Alison Bechdel, and David Yoon. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
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Interview with an Indie Press: Seven Stories Press staffers talk about their latest faves and trusting readers to handle complex projects. | Lit Hub
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“The mind tries to both wall and unwall the self. This I know.” Kimberly Grey examines chronic pain and the loss of her mother. | Lit Hub
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Ann McCutchan reflects on first falling in love with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling, as a fourth-grader new to Florida, and writing a long-due biography of the writer. | Lit Hub
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New titles by Jhumpa Lahiri, Martha Wells, and Elissa Washuta all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
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Keith Roysdon on Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet, crime cinema’s greatest odd couple. | CrimeReads
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“I use feminism now as a way to discover and to work and write about what I think of as the human condition.” Vivian Gornick discusses her relationship to feminism, Fierce Attachments, and marriage. | Shondaland
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Here’s how Jon Waters is getting through the pandemic.| NYRB
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“Like many systems that appear meticulous, the writing of citations is a subjective art. Never more so than in fiction, where citation is an entirely other kind of animal.” On literary citation and reading with one eye on Google. | The Drift
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Can the nonsense-heavy work of Lewis Carroll “orient us away from racially charged assumptions about human advancement that lie deep in the modern psyche”? | LARB
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“When the industry designates whose presence is deemed realistic, that sends a message about who’s worthy of love—and who isn’t.” On the homogeneity of the romance genre—and the writers pushing for greater diversity. | The Walrus
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Writers’ organizations are banding together to demand that the Walt Disney Company pays authors royalties in a timely manner. | Publishers Weekly
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“I just had to see through out of sheer doggedness.” Maggie Shipstead recounts the odyssey of writing her latest book. | Los Angeles Times
Also on Lit Hub: Eula Biss on how motherhood radicalized Adrienne Rich Kate Summerscale on the violent haunting that rattled an English suburb • Read from Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s newly translated novel, The Passenger (trans. Philip Boehm)