TODAY: In 1888, T.S. Eliot is born.

• Javier Garcia del Moral makes a case for the importance of literary festivals: “The time we devote to others in person has shrunk, almost without our noticing. A festival interrupts that trend.” | Lit Hub Craft
• Sophia Rosenfeld explains how the power of choice shaped the modern world, from her Cundill Prize-shortlisted The Age of Choice. | Lit Hub History
• On Virginia Woolf’s room of her own and the role of writing spaces in the creative lives of literary icons. | Lit Hub Craft
• “…the best Korean sool parties are hosted at home like this—more of a never-ending friend hang than a packed blowout party.” Irene Yoo shares a recipe for samgyeopsal, grilled pork belly that pairs perfectly with soju. | Lit Hub Food
• Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know, Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me, Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, and Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance all feature among September’s best reviewed books. | Book Marks
• M. L. Rio explains the enjoyment and peculiarity of writing songs for fictional bands: “Too much granular detail can suck the life out of something.” | Lit Hub Craft
• “we will lose / our minds.” Read “Sniped Sonnet,” a poem by Zeina Hashem Beck. | Lit Hub Poetry
• “The heat is so scorching it hurts even to breathe. You have to take the air in sips.” Read from Zuzana Říhová’s novel Playing Wolf, translated by Alex Zucker. | Lit Hub Fiction
• “What if, instead of resisting the deaths of the last survivors, we allow ourselves to accept their mortality?” AI scholar Benjamin Charles Germain Lee considers how the technology is being used to mediate the stories of Holocaust survivors. | Longreads
• Sasha Geffen revisits Joe Westmoreland’s Tramps Like Us, a classic of queer literature whose “greatest achievement is its ability to look into a time when illness and institutional abandonment foreclosed living possibility—and to enliven it from the inside.” | The Nation
• “It is an older man reckoning with what he himself, as a younger man, would probably have thought was stupid.” On Pedro Almodóvar’s younger and older selves. | Public Books
• Laura Clawson examines assimilation and cultural identity in American classrooms. | JSTOR Daily
• Ashley Dawson considers the future of sustainable energy through the lenses of two new books. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Nicholas Boggs and Richie Shazam on the love that shaped James Baldwin: “He constructed these alternative families, these chosen families…” | Interview