THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET

TODAY: In 1838, naturalist, author, environmental philosopher John Muir is born. 

• Why do we hate the word moist? Science may actually have an answer. | Lit Hub History
• “I don’t know about magic, but something happens in my bed, which is where I tend to think best.” In praise of writing in bed. | Lit Hub Craft
• Bonnie Friedman recommends books about women with secret lives by Deesha Philyaw, Azar Nafisi, Annie Ernaux, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Jayne Anne Phillips, author of Small Town Girls, tells Jane Ciabattari about chronicling her West Virginia upbringing. | Lit Hub In Conversation
• The 20 new books out today include titles by Jayne Anne Phillips, Xochitl Gonzalez, T. C. Boyle, and more! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• How Lewis and Clark influenced a nascent American literature. | Lit Hub Criticism
• “That early tour gave the Rolling Stones a real education.” Why 1963 established The Rolling Stones’ bad boy image. | Lit Hub Music
• In honor of National Poetry Month, we recommended reading Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California” today. | Lit Hub Poetry
• “Perhaps my sisters would say that my sojourn in Kansas and Missouri, and then all the way to Massachusetts to visit my dead husband’s family, chastened me.” Read from Jane Smiley’s new novel, Lidie. | Lit Hub Fiction
• Research suggests that preschool can narrow reading achievement gaps. | JSTOR Daily
• Several of John Keats’s love letters to Fanny Brawne have been returned four decades after they were stolen. | The Guardian
• “As with any community, isolated to pursue their own purposes, there is trouble related to that isolation.” On Carlos Reygadas, Miriam Toews, and Mennonites in Mexico. | Dirt
• Sean Guynes unearths Thomas Burnett Swann’s forgotten fantasies. | LARB
• How, after 36 years, poet Henri Coulette returned to print. | The Orange County Register 
• “Oddly, from a writer who has been consistently ridiculed for TMI, I wanted to know more.” Kaitlyn Greenidge considers what Lena Dunham’s memoir leaves out. | Harper’s Bazaar