TODAY: In 1957, Malcolm Lowry, author of the 1947 novel Under the Volcano, dies.
- Because “queerdom is vast and diverse and so are the novels,” Rabih Alameddine recommends some gay books you might not have known were gay. | Lit Hub
- Leigh Stein on social listening, online posturing, and the (fake) language of white capitalist feminism. | Lit Hub
- “Everything I needed to know about writing and editing a novel I learned by photographing a dumb brown bag.” Anna Cox on the radical act of being seen. | Lit Hub
- Remembering the words of writer Bo Huston, who bore witness to the peak of the AIDS crisis. | Lit Hub
- “Our ancestors had the wisdom to foresee the tremendous change coming that would inexorably dismantle the world they once knew so well.” Jill La Pointe on the art—and preservation—of Lushootseed storytelling. | Lit Hub
- New titles from Ottessa Moshfegh, Roddy Doyle, Yu Miri, and Ragnar Jónasson all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
- Dwyer Murphy celebrates the 12 best dance sequences in crime cinema history. | CrimeReads
- Celebrating the legacy of Seattle’s Bailey/Coy Books, which brought “a strong gay and lesbian sensibility” to the wider public. | The Seattle Times
- For Bloomsday earlier this month, a linguist and literary scholar discussed isolation in the work of James Joyce and Wole Soyinka. | Brittle Paper
- Some institutions and beliefs seem to be changing after George Floyd’s death. Can the Western literary “canon wars” change too? | The American Scholar
- Leo Tolstoy was no fan of state-sponsored violence in Napoleonic Russia. He was put under surveillance as a result. | The New York Times
- “It was as if, not having to deal with it in the day to day, my daughters were suddenly free to experience their wounds in a deep way for the first time.” Emily Bernard on living through the pandemic, and George Floyd’s murder, with her daughters. | The New Yorker
- “Flannery O’Connor’s words (all of them) will ultimately be judged by the same test all authors endure — the slow assessment of history.” Amy Alznauer responds to a recent New Yorker essay about O’Connor’s racism. | The Bitter Southerner
- Good news(?): “illness, confinement, loneliness, and pervasive fear” may be ideal conditions for writing haiku. | New York Review of Books
Also on Lit Hub: Bill de Blasio must stand up for writers • “climbing“: a poem by Lucille Clifton • Read an excerpt from Andrzej Tichý’s story collection Wretchedness, trans. by Nichola Smalley.