He befriended Mark Twain. His father wrote The Scarlet Letter. He drank wine with Oscar Wilde, George Eliot and Henry James, and William Randolph Hearst once hired him as a reporter. He even published a few books to critical acclaim. So why do so few of us know anything about Julian Hawthorne? In the WaPo, Michael Dirda reviews a new biography. (h/t Arts and Letters Daily)
The Son
Catching Mr. Harvey
Stephen Moss caught up with AD Harvey, the “independent scholar” who tricked an entire discipline into believing Charles Dickens met Fyodor Dostoevsky. (If you missed Eric Naiman’s initial piece on Harvey’s trail of deception and trickery, you’d do well to acquaint yourself now.)
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Writing Isn’t For Everyone
"I hate to break it to you but everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them." For The Outline, literary agent Kate McKean writes about the difference between good stories and good books—and what it takes to write the latter. Pair with: an essay on the books that fight back
Charles Ramsey Memoir in the Works
Charles Ramsey, who is best known for rescuing the three women held captive in Ariel Castro’s house last summer, has signed a book deal with Gray & Co.
The Perilous Art of Giving Books
What is the right book for the right reader? Arts Beat gives examples of books given as presents in literature, which can be just as perilous as giving books as gifts in real life.
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The Arrangements
The New York Times Book Review commissioned a work of fiction about the election from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She chose to write about Melania Trump. If you can handle more Trump, check out Greg Chase’s portrait of a Trump supporter, based on Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury.
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