For about another week, the great works of American literature come dirt cheap: The Library of America is having a 50-percent-off sale.
Edgar Lee Masters had it in for Abraham Lincoln (and Carl Sandburg too).
Paul Theroux wore bell bottoms in the 70s.
Mathematician Manil Suri spent seven years working on his second novel, The Age of Shiva—by his accounting, 64.19 words a day.
Bob Hoover finds a few connections between John Updike and William Dean Howells.
One of the better takedowns of a book I’ve seen in a while is Benjamin Alsup‘s assessment (not online, best as I can tell) in Esquire of Philipp Meyer‘s American Rust: “[I]t sounds like an Ivy Leaguer mimicking the speech patters of white working-class people. It’s one part Woody Guthrie, one party All the Pretty Horses, and 98 parts Hillary Clinton.” (I haven’t read it.)
On a more positive note: Newsweek catches up with Yiyun Li, whose debut novel, The Vagrants, is one of my favorite novels of the young year.
(And while I’m playing tipster, Peter Stephan Jungk‘s Crossing the Hudson, out next month, is one of the best contemporary novels I’ve read in quite some time.)
markathitakis.com 
I just read the Esquire thing. Could not help a bit of indignation: Of course the one problem with saying someone sounds like an Ivy leaguer pretending to be a working class person is the assumption that no working class people sound like Ivy Leaguers. My old man was a carpenter who raised a son who went Ivy League (not me). Granted, he’s no Shakespeare, but my old man can put together coherent thoughts now and again.