• Two early stories by Nabokov at The Atlantic: “Cloud, Castle, Lake” and “The Aurelian.”
• Kathryn Hughes writes an entertaining account of her attempts to “knock off” a Mills & Boon romance novel in the ’80s:
This ambition to write a Mills & Boon ran round the magazine like a craze, the kind of thing that used to happen at school when everyone suddenly decided to dab their pulse points with musk oil or carry their books in a BOAC bag. And, just as at school, we all pretended that we were hardly aware that other people might have had the same idea. I’m pretty certain that there was a briefing pack we all sent off for: Mills & Boon has always been democratically alert to the ambition of its readers to become writers.