TODAY: In 1915, a shell lands a few yards away from soldier and poet Julian Grenfell and a splinter hits him in the head. He is taken to a hospital in Boulogne, where he dies 13 days later. His poem “Into Battle” is published in The Times the day after his death.
- “From Montaigne, I took hairy armpits. I took mustache. I took the desire to smell of nothing.” Wayne Koestenbaum considers incense, Irish Spring, and a few other smells. | Lit Hub
- Compassion and care: part two of Maya Alexandri’s diary of an EMT on the front lines of a pandemic. | Lit Hub
- Esther Kim talks to Immanuel Kim, translator of Friend, the first state-approved North Korean novel in English. | Lit Hub
- Anna Solomon talks to Brian Gresko about politics, playfulness, and imagining a Biblical villain as a feminist hero. | Lit Hub
- Karen Tei Yamashita on cooking, napping, and becoming a full-fledged Jane Austenite. | Lit Hub
- Who the hell was the first person to eat oysters? (And other questions Cody Cassidy has.) | Lit Hub
- “You refused the irrefusable. So now what will you do?” Samantha Harvey on grappling with insomnia and reckoning with the past. | Lit Hub
- ON THE VBC: Amy Jo Burns talks moonshine and snake-handling, on Sheltering • On Rekindled, Douglas Stewart and Garrard Conley in conversation. | Lit Hub
- Pale Fire, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, A Feather on the Breath of God, and more rapid-fire book recs from Susan Choi. | Book Marks
- Author and ER physician Daniel Kalla reflects on two converging crises: Covid-19 and the opioid epidemic. | CrimeReads
- Carolyn Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster, has died at 71. | Publishers Lunch
- “Through rebellion against Didion’s racial grammar, we can unseat her as California’s thin-lipped literary grand dame.” Myriam Gurba on Didion and the Mexican diaspora. | Electric Lit
- Having trouble reading these days? A neuroscientist explains why. | Vox
- A Is for Automation, a children’s book available to read online, presents the ABCs of the future of work to “a labor force that doesn’t yet exist.” | Quartz
- “I really treasure the feeling of writing without expectation and without the thought that it would reach anyone, but just to write.” Jenny Zhang on turning back to poetry. | The Paris Review
- In celebration of Abraham Ortelius, the cartographer whose atlas “invented the world.” | Nautilus
- Dozens of L.A.-based businesses and literary arts groups signed a letter calling on city officials to provide relief to writers struggling to survive during the pandemic. | Los Angeles Times
Also on Lit Hub: “Our Lady of Supaya”: A poem by Roy G. Guzmán • How rogue traders make a fortune on volatile markets • Read from Annie Ernaux’s novel A Girl’s Story, trans. by Alison Strayer.