TODAY: In 2011, Bill Blackbeard, founder and director of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, a comprehensive collection of comic strips and cartoon art from American newspapers, dies.
- Lauren Groff in praise of Shirley Hazzard, whose “humor is built out of close observation and the precision of poetry.” | Lit Hub
- “Only when the vision I’d had of my name glowing from some imagined marquee finally evaporated could I write Anthropica.” David Hollander on surviving the failure of his debut novel. | Lit Hub
- Time for the tea: Ira Nadel dishes on 1970s literary drama, including the time Philip Roth broke up with Random House. | Lit Hub
- “I used to reflexively distrust any work of art that made me cry. And I cry very easily, so the bar is low to begin with.” Jessica Winter and Lynn Steger Strong discuss sentimentality and writing motherhood. | Lit Hub
- Joshua Mohr on giving up the pleasurable narcissism of his carefully engineered routine to become an older dad. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Alexander Wolff celebrates the life and career of his grandfather, Kurt Wolff, who made Pantheon a publishing powerhouse. | Lit Hub
- Song of Solomon, American Pastoral, The Sound and the Fury, and more rapid-fire book recs from Robert Kolker. | Book Marks
- Emma Southon gives a brief history of murder in Ancient Rome. | CrimeReads
- Reading this year’s NBCC Award finalists: David Varno on Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife. | Lit Hub
- Norton Juster, author of The Phantom Tollbooth and The Dot and the Line, has died at 91. | The Hub
- “Who does American English belong to? Maybe it belongs to none of us, because none of us could possibly stuff it all, with all its ever-expanding edges, into our mouths.” Jennifer Shyue on translation and mother(s) tongues. | The Common
- Patricia Engel talks to Jane Ciabattari about writing her most personal novel yet—a multigenerational, mixed-immigration status family saga. | Lit Hub
- “My kitchen smells like all the bakeries we will not allow ourselves to go to. My kitchen smells like my grandmother’s kitchen.” On Crystal Wilkinson’s COVID kitchen. | Oxford American
- “To say something’s beautiful is not necessarily to say that you wish you had it now.” Rebecca Solnit on #MeToo, Harvey Weinsten, and violence against women. | Vanity Fair
- “The system itself needs to change. And that is what is radicalising.” Naomi Klein on activism and her new nonfiction book for young people. | The Guardian
- What makes a good audiobook? Abby Craden, who has recorded almost 400 of them, has some ideas. | Slate
- “I don’t live in that world of the imagination that I used to, but I would love to go back there because ultimately it felt so much more rewarding.” Jo Ann Beard on living and working in the virtual world. | LARB
Also on Lit Hub: John Archibald on the domestic terror of 1960s Birmingham • Kevin Brockmeier on the literary prowess of Marilynne Robinson • Read from Thomas Grattan’s debut novel, The Recent East