Load Up!

At The Atlantic, Sara Polsky wonders if library cards are dying and discusses their history and evolution. Pair with this Millions essay on private libraries and what books reveal about their readers.

"Writing’s too hard, and most of the time you feel dumb. It’s so difficult, you don’t have time to worry about being famous. That just seems like shit that happens outside."  Cheers to that, Salman Rushdie.

A while back, I linked to a contentious letter between Saul Bellow and Jack Ludwig, written not long after Bellow found out Ludwig was sleeping with his wife. Now, here’s a (somewhat) less angry piece of correspondence, sent from Philip Larkin to Barbara Pym. Sample quote: “Has anyone ever done any work on why memories are always unhappy?”

"The short story, as a form, has plenty of defenders," the collection of unconnected short stories, maybe not so much. In an essay for LitHub, regular Millions contributor Jonathan Russell Clark praises the unlinked stories of Barbara the Slut and Other People and Single, Carefree, Mellow because "despite a lack of the wholeness of a novel, something complete and true and hard-won emerges by the end."