“I beg you to see what it is that we must save, and not to let the bigots and misogynists take it away from us again.” Watch Ursula K. Le Guin read about her illegal abortion as a college senior in 1950. | Lit Hub Biography
Ottessa Moshfegh on Dinah Brooke’s 1973 novel: “If it weren’t such a pleasure to read, I’d say that Lord Jim at Home—read by a novelist, like me—was an instrument of torture. It’s that good.” | Lit Hub Criticism
How Sally Ride became a household name. | Lit Hub Space!
Terrell Tannen recalls trying to adapt Jim Harrison’s novels for Hollywood—and making a friend in Harrison along the way. | Lit Hub Memoir
Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds, Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, and James Ellroy’s The Enchanters all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
Mark Wheaton on finding empowerment and autistic representation in an unlikely source: Jason Voorhees. | CrimeReads
The Pulitzer Prize board is amending its citizenship requirement in Books, Music, and Drama: “Those who have made the United States their longtime primary home” will now be eligible in those categories. | The Pulitzer Prizes
“It is a little odd for a fictional narrator to be addressing another fictional character as an immediately identifiable historical figure.” Michael Wood considers the narrator of In Search of Lost Time. | Lapham’s Quarterly
A history of Goody Two-Shoes, the protagonist of the first English children’s novel, published in 1765. | Smithsonian Magazine
Clint Smith on Josiah Henson, the man Harriet Beecher Stowe said inspired her most famous character. | The Atlantic
“Ironically, in writing about an environment I’d considered unworthy of literary depiction, I came up with something that interested readers for the first time.” Jeffrey Eugenides on the story behind The Virgin Suicides. | The Guardian
Art Spiegelman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and more authors discuss how it feels to have their books banned. | Harper’s Bazaar
Take a look at the history of the Atlanta-based Venus magazine, which “took the Black queer south to the world.” | JSTOR Daily
“In bringing Homer back from antiquity, Wilson also had to bridge the chasm of time that has elapsed in English literature since the first full translation of the Odyssey.” Judith Thurman profiles Emily Wilson. | The New Yorker
“Recovered Black modernist texts that rewrite the known historical narrative, Amiable with Big Teeth and Romance in Marseille offer a glimpse of a reclaimed Black future.” Gary Edward Holcomb considers Claude McKay’s legacy. | Los Angeles Review of Books
“I’m interested in memoir, I’m interested in memory. But why are we memoirists? Publishing’s tendency is towards flattening.” Kate Zambreno and Larissa Pham in conversation. | The Nation
“The wounds of Chile are deep, but regardless of how Chileans decide to deal with our trauma and conflicts, Allende’s legacy might have some bearing beyond the borders of his country.” Ariel Dorfman on Salvador Allende, 50 years after his death. | New York Review of Books
“When this outrageous and, frankly, heretical love-and-mustache backstory was introduced in Death on the Nile, I almost threw my popcorn at the screen.” Two Agatha Christie nerds discuss the latest adaptations of her work. | LA Times
New York City public schools are grappling with the question of how to teach children to read. | New York Magazine
“The banality of evil, the normalisation of evil is now manifest in our streets, in our classrooms, in very many public spaces.” Arundhati Roy on the dismantling of democracy in India. | Scroll
“Our only weapon in this fight is solidarity.” Alex N. Press interviews striking writer Alex O’Keefe. | Jacobin
