Playwright John Guare declared war on the kitchen sink, aiming instead for “a theatrical world three or four (or nine or ten) sizes larger than realism.” On our website, dramaturg and co-editor of the new LOA edition of Guare’s plays Michael Paller reflects on the Six Degrees of Separation author.

“Just as she claimed New York for herself without seeking approval or permission, Swenson followed her poetic muse unapologetically, immune to negative criticism.” In @theartsfuse.bsky.social, a look at Margaret A. Brucia’s revelatory new biography of the ahead-of-her-time poet May Swenson.

In @clereviewbooks.bsky.social, a deeply original dive into Don DeLillo’s JFK assassination epic Libra in the form of “twelve bullets, four appendices, and six exhibits.” “DeLillo’s Libra is a book about the entanglement of reading, writing, and living,” Nicole Kaack explains.

Two weeks after casting her ballot in the 1872 Presidential election on November 5, Susan B. Anthony was arrested and charged with “knowingly voting without having a lawful right to vote.” Convicted and fined $100, Anthony called the verdict “the greatest judicial outrage history has ever recorded.”

“One imagines Chester Himes as a species of cactus lurking along the edges of the literary landscape,” writes Gene Seymour in @thenation.com. Best known for his Harlem noirs, Himes inspired the beleaguered Black American writer at the center of John A. Williams’s 1967 novel, The Man Who Cried I Am.

Stephen Crane, The Upturned Face (via @libraryofamerica.bsky.social; #skystorians; drawing of a dead soldier, mid-nineteenth century; black, white chalk, graphite on gray-green paper by Ange-Louis Janet Lange [1815–1872], courtesy of Cooper Hewitt): storyoftheweek.loa.org/2025/10/the-...

For Halloween, a reappraisal of Shirley Jackson’s “definitive American horror novel” in City Journal: “Jackson infuses The Haunting of Hill House not only with a requisite number of shivers but also with a human factor missing in so much of the subsequent novels indebted to her vision.”

Helen Vendler read and wrote about poetry with an unmatched eye for the “person behind, or inside, or alongside, the poem, assembling language so that it fits how they have lived and how they feel.” On loa.org, scholar and poet Stephanie Burt, who studied with Vendler, reflects on her influence.

“[John] Adams wears his heart on his sleeve and reveals all of his ambitions, doubts, and insecurities, especially in his diary, which is one of the greatest and most readable in all of American literature,” writes Gordon S. Wood. The Founding Father and second president was born 290 years ago OTD.

In bookstores now: the LOA edition of John Guare’s plays, praised by Tony Kushner as “an original combination of realism, dream state, psychopathology, vision, delusion, humor, compassion, grief, and terror.” Discover the writer of Six Degrees of Separation and order your copy: loa.org/books/plays/

“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in his acceptance speech for the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in the author’s absence on Oct. 28 (Hemingway was recuperating from a series of plane crashes at the time). (1/2)

Happy birthday to the brilliant Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior, her “memoirs of a childhood among ghosts,” the genre-defying China Men, and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, “a Great American Novel, but also a Great Asian American novel,” according to @vietthanhnguyen.bsky.social.

A big thanks to @theredshoes.bsky.social for sharing a correction to this post (with citations)! Read the thread for the true origin of this quote.

Ernest Hemingway’s first novel The Sun Also Rises was published 99 years ago this week, with a “respectably sexy” Hellenistic cover that Hemingway’s editor thought would appeal to “the feminine readers who control the destinies of so many novels.” A touch ironic for the he-man of American letters...

The literary cartography of Ursula K. Le Guin is on display at the AA Gallery in London through 12/6. “Le Guin began her writing process by drawing a map,” writes Mike Duggan in The Conversation. “This was as much a way for her to imagine a world as it was a technique to structure a story about it.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, the inimitable author of SFF classics, a poet who won the admiration of Harold Bloom, and companion throughout her life to nearly two dozen cats, would have turned 96 years old today. Uncover her astonishing legacy, from the peaceful planet Haim to the wild shores of Klatsand.

“Rediscovering Rachel Carson reminds you that books can make the world a better place to live in,” writes the Irish Independent of LOA’s recent boxed set of the pioneering environmental writer’s collected works.

May Swenson moved from Utah to the heart of Depression-era NYC with a single mission: to become a poet. On our website, biographer Margaret A. Brucia, author of the The Key to Everything: May Swenson, a Writer’s Life (@princetonupress.bsky.social), discusses this daring, ahead-of-her-time writer.

“If you riff hard enough, you end up in the bedrock of shared humanity,” writes @girinathan.bsky.social in Defector. “At least if you’re as potent a riffer as Charles Portis.” A reader enters the hilarious and turbulent world of Portis’s 1979 gem The Dog of the South: defector.com/charles-port...

In bookstores today, LOA’s one-volume edition of Octavia E. Butler’s Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy, featuring the classic novels Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago. Genius works of Afrofuturism, they ask enduring questions about colonization, gender, technology, and the future of humankind.

No 20th-century political thinker speaks as clearly and provocatively to our present moment than Hannah Arendt, born OTD in 1906. In a recent panel, four scholars discussed her 1951 masterpiece The Origins of Totalitarianism, out now in an expanded annotated edition from Library of America.

“Every cat lover will likely recognize a furry friend in a drawing or line of poetry in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats,” writes Portland Monthly. “She understood cats as well as she understood people.” www.pdxmonthly.com/arts-and-cul...

Eugene O’Neill’s late masterpiece The Iceman Cometh premiered on Broadway on Oct. 9, 1946. Set during the same 1912 summer as the playwright’s classic Long Day’s Journey into Night, Iceman, says critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, yields “an instinctive anticipation of the Theater of the Absurd.”

A clowder of advance readers got their paws on @ursulakleguin.com’s Book of Cats (yes, sitting on top of a book counts as reading for these little guys). Explore this full-color album of cat-centric poems, cartoons, and prose pieces, in bookstores today. loa.org/books/ursula-k-le-guins-book-of-cats/

Original master of the macabre Edgar Allan Poe died on this day in 1849 in fittingly mysterious style: delirious, wearing someone else’s clothes, Poe was hospitalized for apparent intoxication in Baltimore but rapidly deteriorated, exclaiming “Lord, help my poor soul” before passing on October 7.

On @literaryhub.bsky.social, Christopher Spaide reflects on the words of his teacher Helen Vendler, whose final essays appear in a new LOA volume. The goal, he writes, is not to look for the easy-to-grasp features of a poem, but “to strive to inhabit every poem in all its standoffish singularity.”

Why does Peanuts continue to compel such fandom around the world, 75 years after its debut? Andrew Blauner, editor of The Peanuts Papers, joined @usatoday.com's The Excerpt to share his take alongside other writers and cartoonists who contributed to LOA's anthology on the immortal comic.

“‘I am a genius of a writer’, Plath had written to her [mother] a month earlier. ‘I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.’” In @thetls.bsky.social, Seamus Perry examines the brief, incandescent career of Sylvia Plath, with a nod to LOA’s recently published I Am the Arrow.

Charles Schulz hated the name Peanuts, but that didn’t stop his 4-panel strip from taking over the world. The iconic comic, which debuted in newspapers 75 years ago today, ran for 50 years, making it, in the words of @macleans.bsky.social, “arguably the longest story ever told by one human being.”

On @wellreadnaturalist.bsky.social, a shoutout to our forthcoming Rachel Carson boxed set. “Her work and her stalwart determination to bring what she had discovered to the attention of the public...have made her an inspiration to conservationists, environmentalists, and naturalists ever since.”

Reading Jim Thompson is like “being trapped in a bomb shelter with a chatty maniac who also happens to be the air raid warden,” wrote Robert Polito of the genius crime writer, born 119 years ago this September. Look for a collection of five of Thompson’s shocking best out from LOA in Spring 2026.

The revered author @ursulakleguin.com had nearly two dozen cats throughout her life, and they left indelible pawprints on her work and imagination. On our website, we present mini-biographies of Le Guin’s feline companions, excerpted from the soon-to-be-released Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats.

“[T]he presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do,” wrote Flannery O’Connor of the Nobel Prize-winning creator of Yoknapatawpha County, born on this day in 1897. Explore Faulkner’s peerless literary legacy on loa.org.

“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings,” wrote Ernest Hemingway of his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, born OTD in 1896. Eighty-five years after his death at age 44, Fitzgerald stands as arguably the quintessential American writer. loa.org/writers/210

Don’t miss our fall preview sale, going on now through Friday, 9/26. Get 15% off all LOA books and sets, including new releases like our single-volume edition of Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats, and the works of playwright John Guare. Visit loa.org/books.

A huge thanks to everyone who came out to the @bkbookfest.bsky.social this past weekend and stopped by LOA’s booth! We had a wonderful time meeting fellow mega-fans of great literature, chatting about our books, and enjoying the beautiful September weather. Check out some pictures from the event!

Patricia Lockwood is reading LOA’s Wallace Stevens collection in a new @nytimes.com By the Book. “The discouraging thing about writing criticism sometimes is the response: Now I never have to read anything by this person,” she says. “But I don’t write about writers who aren’t worth my attention.”

Zora Neale Hurston’s magisterial novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was published 88 years ago. Written over seven weeks while Hurston conducted field work in Haiti, the book contains, in the words of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “the greatest synesthesia in the history of African American literature.”

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats tote bags are in, and we’re happy to report they can comfortably fit four or five LOA volumes, a small grocery run, or one full-sized cat. Find us at the Brooklyn Book Festival this Sunday to get yours (booths 405 & 406)! www.loa.org/books/ursula...

With Gilmore Girls back on Netflix, we’ve been seeing a surge of people asking about our Dawn Powell volumes (sample below). As Rory says in S2Ep20, “She wrote 16 amazing novels, 9 plays, and there are some who actually claim that it was Powell who made the jokes that Dorothy Parker got credit for.”

Farewell to iconic actor and director Robert Redford, who played perhaps the greatest on-screen characterization of Jay Gatsby in the 1974 film version of Fitzgerald’s famous novel, with a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola. Here he is opposite Mia Farrow, who starred as Daisy in the adaptation.

Today marks the centenary of Samuel Menashe, author of (very) short poems, winner of the first Neglected Masters Award from the Poetry Foundation, and a brilliantly unclassifiable voice. “The struggle is against too many words!” he declared in this charming 2009 @wnyc.org profile.

Playwright John Logan shares his love for Leatherstocking Tales author James Fenimore Cooper, born OTD in 1789: “What draws me to Cooper isn’t the action, it’s the elegy. Something beautiful was passing away, something uniquely American, something irreplaceable. And Cooper noted it and mourned it.”

I'm teaching this online seminar on some of Joan Didion's essays with @libraryofamerica.bsky.social, beginning September 29. Four sessions, 75 mins each. We'll be talking about some of her most prescient essays, which I think we should be reading right now. Come join. www.loa.org/news-and-vie...

Last night, LOA LIVE welcomed four distinguished scholars for a scintillating discussion of Alexis de Tocqueville’s masterpiece of political thought, Democracy in America. Watch the full panel featuring @jbf1755.bsky.social, Steven Hahn, James T. Kloppenberg, and Olivier Zunz on our YouTube channel.

Georgia Douglas Johnson, a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, was born 145 years ago. A prolific playwright, she hosted her “Saturday Salons” in Washington, DC, for more than 40 years, welcoming poets and writers including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Alain Locke, and Jessie Redmon Fauset.

“These sparkling essays take readers inside the lives and works of the poets you’ll encounter in this superb collection.” In @daytondailynews.com, praise for revered poetry critic Helen Vendler’s final book, Inhabit the Poem, out this fall from LOA. www.daytondailynews.com/lifestyles/b...

This Weds., 9/10, four eminent scholars discuss Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, a prescient account of the virtues and dangers of our politics and culture. With @jbf1755.bsky.social, Steven Hahn, James T. Kloppenberg, and Olivier Zunz. RSVP for free: www.eventbrite.com/e/reading-de...

The word “hippie” debuted in print 60 years ago, in an article by Michael Fallon: “Five untroubled young ‘hippies’ sprawled on floor mattresses and slouched in an armchair retrieved from a debris box, flipped cigarette ashes at a seatbelt in their Waller Street flat and pondered their next move.”

The author Richard Wright was born OTD, Sept. 4, 1908. James Baldwin criticized Wright’s novel Native Son (1940) in the essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” calling the book “a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy.” But that's not the whole story (literally).