The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1914, Tove Jansson is born.
- “I need to know if my character shops for convenience or comfort. If she’s buying ingredients for elaborate recipes, or frozen ready-meals.” Flynn Berry on grocery shopping as a means of character development. | Lit Hub Craft
- Alex Zucker on style, voice, and translating Magdaléna Platzová’s Life After Kafka. | Lit Hub On Translation
- “What would it feel like to teach about travel when the best advice I could give was to go nowhere and stand up for something?” Nathan Deuel on trying to teach travel writing amid UCLA student protests. | Lit Hub Travel
- On the systemic abuse of Black refugees in Israel: “Hatred for the Black immigrants joined hatred for the “beautiful souls” who supported them.” | Lit Hub Politics
- Helen Phillips’s Hum, Eliza Griswold’s Circle of Hope, and Jane Alison’s Villa E all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- Rollo Romig on Bangalore, India’s police force, and investigating the shocking assassination of Gauri Lankesh. | Lit Hub History
- Do dolphins give each other names? And do they do it by whistling? Arik Kershenbaum answers these questions and more. | Lit Hub Nature
- “The Chairman was still talking.” Read from Charles Ferdinand Ramuz’s novel Great Fear on the Mountain, translated by Bill Johnston. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “James wanted every sentence to be artful. What he could often forget, later in life, is that some sentences just need to say what they need to say.” On Henry James’s prefaces. | London Review of Books
- Paul Vangelisti on the life and work of Neeli Cherkovski: “A remarkable thing about Cherkovski’s temporal preoccupation is how, over many years, it sustains its origins in friendship and camaraderie.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
- In praise of weird fiction. | The Washington Post
- “Although I think being nice is the best policy in most situations, I also think that a limited case exists for being mean.” Matt Dinan makes the case for truth. | The Hedgehog Review
- On the history of anti-trans panic in sports: “As is often the case, these unscientific decisions were made by people who purported to be defenders of science.” | The Nation
- Jonathan Kramnick on the craft of literary criticism. | Public Books
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