TODAY: In 1908, Salvadoran poet Vicente Acosta dies on his birthday.
- Tarot reader Lisa Stardust examines Sylvia Plath’s relationship to her deck. | Lit Hub Criticism
- How the expectation that “books are now asked to function simultaneously as texts and as lifestyle objects” influences cover design in the social media era. | Lit Hub Design
- “It’s only a question of whether you’re looking through a telescope or a microscope.” Michael Cunningham on making peace with the scale of your work. | Lit Hub Craft
- Lara Norgaard remembers translating the queer poetics of Cris Judar’s They Marched Under the Sun. | Lit Hub On Translation
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Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine, Michael Cuningham’s Unsayable, and Claire Vaye Watkins’ Yellow Pine all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- “As if in / moments lay / plummets.” Read “Drinking the Bees,” a poem by Christian Wiman from the collection The Dance. | Lit Hub Poetry
- “It started with a toaster and ended with a Maytag washerdryer combo and four new steel-belted radials.” Read “You’ve Told Me This Joke Before” from George Singleton’s new collection, Wounded Boarders. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “The play, he insisted, strove to avoid definition. This strategy of avoidance leaves us to gaze at a landscape void of meaning, one that by turns is the source of our bemusement and amusement.” Robert Zaretsky on Waiting for Godot. | The American Scholar
- What does a Homerist think of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey? | Hyperallergic
- Athar Abu Samra writes about returning home to Gaza. | The Nation
- In case you need something else to worry about, everyone is judging your bookcase. | Salon
- “I did love New York, but I love New York more now after writing about it for seven years in this certain kind of way.” Natalie Weiner interviews Colson Whitehead. | Defector