TODAY: In 1950, Julia Alvarez is born. 

• “The porn star was a recent arrival in the firmament of American celebrity.” Jane Kamensky on how Candida Royalle became adult entertainment’s leading feminist performer and advocate. | Lit Hub Biography
• David Halberstam, Jonathan Mahler, Joe Posnanski, and more. Keith O’Brien recommends literary baseball dramas that will knock one out of the park. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Alexandra Tanner and Sasha Fletcher talk about process, navigating money as writers, and writing for yourself: “Sharing your work comes with so many little humiliations and demands and contortions.” | Lit Hub In Conversation
• “The sudden death of my mother feels nothing like the slow deterioration of my father’s body.” Kristine S. Ervin considers memoir and grief. | Lit Hub Memoir
• Greg Wrenn recommends deeply researched eco-memoirs by Florence Williams, Camile Dungy, Elizabeth Rush, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• “The scene was this: I was seated on the 6 train, checking my mascara in a compact, when a trio of teenage boys deposited a large boom box near my suede boots.” Read from Ursula Villarreal-Moura’s new novel, Like Happiness. | Lit Hub Fiction
• On Ingeborg Bachmann, Tove Ditlevsen, and revival fetishism, or “what happens when feminist politics meets the capitalist underbelly of the international, and particularly the English-language, publishing industry.” | Public Books 
• What Toni Morrison’s rejection letters from her time as an editor at Random House reveal about an era of dramatic change in publishing. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• What do Herman Melville and Marvel Comics’ The Punisher have in common? Pittsfield, Massachusetts. | The Paris Review
• “No matter how many books, articles, Tweets, and TikToks I’d gobbled up, it had apparently eluded me that no one was ever going to say I’d produced enough.” Kelly Stout chronicles her quest for optimal productivity. | Esquire
• Margaret Atwood reflects on the enduring appeal of Carrie, fifty years on. | The New York Times
• What does it mean to screen condolences? On moderating online obituary comments. | The Guardian