Uncovering art history in Western Ukraine: Benjamin Balint recounts the unlikely discovery of Bruno Schulz’s fairy-tale murals. | Lit Hub Art
“What had I done, insisting on more of us?” Maggie Smith on the anxious, silent first year of motherhood. | Lit Hub Memoir
Jena Friedman asks her favorite male comedians—Jon Stewart, Reggie Watts, and Bob Odenkirk among them—some of the inane questions she gets as a “woman in comedy.” | Lit Hub Humor
“A veritable maze of imagery, a labyrinth of connotation, a factory of concepts.” In praise of the long, complicated sentence. | Lit Hub Criticism
Izumi Suzuki’s Hit Parade of Tears, Mark Bowden’s Life Sentence, and Molly Prentiss’s Old Flame all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
Future shock: 8 crime novels that blur the lines into sci-fi. | CrimeReads
“The books that he chooses for his annual reading list are all his personal choices.” How our most literary of presidents chooses what he’s going to read next. | Esquire
Hollywood writers—half of whom are novelists at this point—are poised to go on strike. | The Daily Beast
Inside the oldest children’s bookstore in America. | The Orange County Register
Rachel Heng on the similarities between raising a child and writing a novel: “Both brought sleepless nights, an overwhelming sense of impossibility, the panicked feeling that I simply will not be able to do this, the bone-deep conviction that I must.” | The Atlantic
Laurie Colwin’s child, R. F. Jurjevics, on discovering their mother’s previously unpublished story “Evensong.” | The New Yorker
First they banned books, now the GOP wants to defund libraries. | MSNBC
A look at the origins of Bookshop.org, and how it’s thriving (and helping indie bookstores) in Amazon’s world. | WIRED
“Was the ‘artificially intelligent’ chatbot ripping me off, personally?” One writer’s deep reckoning with ChatGPT. | InsideHook
Catherine Lacey recommends 10 “badly behaved” biographies. | The Guardian
Rapid-fire book recs from Congresswoman Katie Porter. | ELLE
Charles Dickens did a LOT for literature, but did he also come up with the first fictional android? | NewScientist
“I had published the story in a half-baked state (in a literary magazine), and regretted it very much.” Haruki Murakami’s first novel in six years, a remix of a very old story, hits shelves in Japan today. | Kyodo News
Will Lloyd wonders how male literary novelists became terminally uncool. | The New Statesman
“I don’t want to publish just for the sake of publishing.” Don Winslow on retiring from writing to focus on activism. | New Zealand Herald
“I’ve become more easily bored by plot. A little goes a long way.” Charles Frazier on his reading habits, favorite writers, and why some classics are better enjoyed later in life. | The New York Times