Read More TODAY: In 1919, F. Scott Fitzgerald gives the manuscript of This Side of Paradise to his friend Shane Leslie to deliver to Maxwell Perkins, editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York.

• Suzanne Roberts offers advice (and prompts!) for writing about sex. | Lit Hub Craft
• How does time actually work? Jim Al-Khalili explores the flow of physics. | Lit Hub Science
• These Latin American novels from the 1920s chronicled an era of agriculture and labor. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Eric T. Jennings introduces you to Edmond Albius, the enslaved man who pioneered the cultivation of the vanilla plant, from the Cundill Prize-shortlisted Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean. | Lit Hub History
• Chloe Benjamin recommends literary sci-fi and fantasy novels that offer hope by Ted Chiang, Susanna Clarke, Mohsin Hamid, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Marlon James’ The Disappearers, Jon Ronson’s The Castle, Chloe Benjamin’s Under Story, and Emily Wilson’s Crossing the Wine Dark Sea all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
• Louise Brangan traces the stories of girls sent to work in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, from her Cundill Prize-shortlisted The Fallen: The Lost Girls of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and a Legacy of Silence. | Lit Hub History
• “Frank Meir has spent a lifetime running from his past, carefully concealing his heritage, though people did not seem to care.” Read from Philippe Collin’s debut novel, The Barman of the Ritz. | Lit Hub Fiction
• Nick Ripatrazone reports from the high school where he teaches, at the dawn of the phone ban era. | Slate
• “She is a writer of uncommon commitment to capturing the genie-soul of New Orleans. Her repetitions are the persistent attempts to meet and master its memory and essence.” Walker Rutter-Bowman on Nancy Lemann’s life and work. | The New Republic
• How Ray Reipen launched an iconic rock club and fostered Boston’s sonic counterculture. | The MIT Press Reader
• On that time Hans Christian Andersen crashed out on Charles Dickens’s lawn. | Aeon
• Three critics reflect on 25 years of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. | The New York Times