TODAY: In 1818, Emily Brontë, seen here in a portrait made by her brother Branwell, is born.
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“How is our work circulated in a marketplace that struggles not just to see all of its writers as equals, but to pay them as equals?” Elaine Castillo reckons with the problems at the heart of publishing. | Lit Hub Criticism
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Antonio Padilla unveils the inner workings of black holes, “a place where there is literally no tomorrow, where the future does not exist.” | Lit Hub Space!
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Contrary to reports, experimental fiction is alive and well in the USA: John Domini on the renaissance of the weird. | Lit Hub Criticism
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A reading list of journalists who (successfully) turned to fiction. | Lit Hub
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Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Ron Shelton’s The Church of Baseball, and CJ Hauser’s The Crane Wife all feature among July’s best reviewed books. | Book Marks
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Dwyer Murphy searches for the funniest crime novel ever written. | CrimeReads
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Maeve Higgins looks at Republicans’ war on libraries. | The Guardian
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How to fall back in love with reading in an age of diminished attention. | Vox
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“I still don’t know of any way to deal with rejection other than to take whatever lessons it provides and start planning the next attempt.” Nicole Chung offers advice on pitching. | The Atlantic
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Emily Kopley talks about the links between Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel Jacob’s Room and Shakespeare. | Oxford University Press Blog
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Carmen Maria Machado on ego, writing careers, and waiting to debut: “The business end of writing is unavoidable, if you want people to read your work. But you must resist it, until you’re ready.” | Substack
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Emma Straub, Hernan Diaz, and more writers share their philosophies of bookshelf organization. | The Washington Post
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A look at the 135-year history of Esperanto. | Smithsonian Magazine
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Vivan Gornick on Greenwich Village’s Heterodoxy Club and American feminism: “Almost every issue of the day engaged the interest of Heterodoxy women: besides suffrage, that included Freudian analysis, labor reform, birth control, and the freedom to speak and write one’s mind.” | NYRB
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Eleanor Johnson considers the horror and humor of Beowulf. | Public Books
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“Above all, her work is an act of bearing witness: a committed and steadfast response to the social injustice she saw all around her.” Francesca Wade considers the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser. | The Baffler
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“For years, he provided creative fuel for his father, who depicted him in several books until he faded from his writings.” Alex Vadukul on the life and death of Daniel Auster. | The New York Times
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Emma Goldberg on the future of correspondence: “There’s so much to glean from a letter’s style. The ebullience of a run-on sentence and the mischief of an exclamation point.” | Astra Magazine
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Francesca Peacock considers Natalia Ginzburg’s “fierce commitment to emancipatory politics.” | Verso Blog
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Tasha Tsiaperas on the long history of Half Price Books, which is celebrating 50 years of bookselling. | Axios
Also on Lit Hub:
In search of the funniest crime novel ever written • Elisa Albert pays tribute to the great Ani DiFranco • Read a haunted house story by Virginia Woolf • Volodymyr Rafeenko on unlearning Russian, his mother tongue • Wasps are less bothersome (and more beautiful) than we think • The story of two lost fountain pens • Leah Franqui goes home to Puerto Rico with her father • Reading Saint Augustine’s Confessions as a quarterlife crisis • What happens when you offer grammar advice to strangers in the middle of Manhattan? • Meet Elinor Glyn, founder of the modern sex novel • How ISIS filled the power vacuum left by US forces in Iraq • Three perfect zucchini recipes from Ella Risbridger • Writing inspiration can come from anywhere, including a googly-eyed Roomba • How colonialism and patriarchy create enduring misery for Native American women • What have pollsters learned from their mistakes in the 2016 election? • When women proved that math wasn’t a “man’s job” • On Claude Simon’s classic nouveau roman, The Flanders Road • How to read to children • Samantha Hunt shares the visual inspirations behind her latest book • Lio Min explores gender and sexuality within anime • Oscar Hokeah on writing a multicultural Indigenous story • The big tent of rock and roll films • Luz Aguirre on living as an undocumented American • Inside the making of an artist’s book