You likely don’t need to hear one more commentary about the Huckleberry Finn foofaraw, but consider reading Jon Clinch‘s, as somebody who spent a lot of time attempting to inhabit Twain’s world in his 2007 novel, Finn.
What happened to the literary prodigy Barbara Follett? (via)
Granta‘s 1983 “Dirty Realism” issue, which featured stories by Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Jayne Anne Phillips, Angela Carter, and many more, is claimed as the best single issue of a literary magazine ever. (via)
Two editors discuss their discovery of three previously undocumented Zora Neale Hurston stories.
Toward a complete guide to Dashiell Hammett‘s Baltimore haunts.
On the growth of David Foster Wallace studies.
Richard Ford on his home state, where he’s returning to teach: “I think the state, in the hands and eyes of its writers, has a lot that needs to be explained. Writers are imaginative explainers. There’s a lot of received wisdom, history, a lot of drama in the fabric that is Mississippi that could be seen not to make a whole lot of sense.”
Why Paul Theroux will not be writing an autobiography.
The National Book Critics Circle gathers up some recommendations for books that should be back in print; I put in for Renata Adler’s Speedboat, a novel I wrote about here last spring.
“[T]he relation of literary production to social inequality has changed, and it is that relation, or was that relation, and that relation only, that constituted African American Literature.”
Paul Auster is a potato, not a tropical flower. Allow him to explain:
markathitakis.com 
What relation can literature have to social inequality as long as books keep ignoring the elephant in the room: multinational corporations?
I’m not convinced that novels are avoiding multinational corporations, or that they have to in order to discuss social inequality. And the idea that fiction must have a mission—expose the multinationals, repair social inequality—rubs me the wrong way.