Book Pirates

The 11th Soda Series is tonight at the Soda bar in Brooklyn (Prospect Heights). The special reading and conversation will feature Susan Daitch, Brian Evenson, and Bradford Morrow.

Mary Norris on the cusswords permitted to run in The New Yorker over the years. Sadly, the piece is not titled "Fuck This Shit."

In many of Queens' 62 library branches, copies of books are being borrowed are in Korean, Chinese or Spanish. A library branch in Astoria, responding to its own diverse readership, carries children’s books in Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese and Gujarati. Striving to cater to the intensifying globalization of its surrounding streets, the New York neighborhood library speaks your language as never before.

"How can you write a complete story without a conventional plot? We often hear that in short stories, the main character must change. But in some stories, including some by Grace Paley, the characters don’t change. Instead, her stories change the reader. You’re different by the time you reach the end." We've told you about The Atlantic's "By Heart" series plenty of times before. This week, it's Alice Mattison, who touches on everything from character development to the strange stories of Grace Paley.

Melissa Broder shares her thoughts on open marriage and illness in an excerpt from her So Sad Today. Pair with Gila Lyons’s Millions essay on writing through illness.