“If it wasn’t signed by some lawyer, I’d imagine ol’ Gentleman Jack penning it himself, twirling his bushy mustache.”

Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings has been a Millions favorite, so we're excited to hear about her next book, Belzhar, a young adult novel inspired by Sylvia Plath. The book comes out on September 30 and follows a 16-year-old grieving  at a boarding school for fragile teenagers, where she and her classmates discover an alternate world. Wolitzer spoke to NPR about why she was drawn to YA. "Much of what adolescents feel seems set in relief, and much of what they experience is happening to them for the first time."

"Good political poems, outlive the events that shape them... they lead strange lives." One such poem, written after a pogrom 100 years ago, has since been translated by Palestinian resistance leaders, and more recently claimed as "Israeli" by PM Netanyahu. Some of the most notable works of the genre have been collected by Poetry. New projects in political poetry I'm excited about: online journal Matter Monthly, and Rattle's Sunday column for a political poem addressing events of that week.

David Barnett writes at The Guardian on the first transgender superhero to take center stage in a comic book, Chalice. Clarence Harlan Orsi writes about the representation of the transgender community in literary criticism.