The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1892, George Bernard Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses premieres at the Royalty Theatre in London. It is not well received.
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A magnificent relic: Samantha Harvey muses on the slow death of the International Space Station. | Lit Hub Space!
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Why there’s more to eyeliner than meets the eye. | Lit Hub History
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From mass incarceration to mass supervision: How parole keeps ex-prisoners stranded between two worlds. | Lit Hub Politics
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The best crime, mystery, and suspense novels of 2023. | CrimeReads
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The points are tallied and the results are in: Here are the Best Reviewed Fiction Titles and the Best Reviewed Nonfiction Books of 2023. | Book Marks
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As Israeli airstrikes continue in Gaza, Palestinians mourn the loss of their libraries, which “locals recall as refuges and rare beacons of culture.” | The Washington Post
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At last: Tariq Ali on the death of Henry Kissinger. | Verso
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“Salter was determined to stay alive until his five novels were recognized.” Jeffrey Meyers considers James Salter’s strange career. | Salmagundi Magazine
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Translators Megan McDowell and Esther Allen discuss the state of Latin American literature in translation. | AS/COA
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“I cannot know what does not speak of its own existence. I cannot fabricate a firm idea to mourn.” On the dramatic irony of pregnancy. | Granta
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“I like to envision what Friedan might have made of the term ‘mother’ as reimagined via queer culture and now used predominantly of cis-het white women who exude self-possession and hauteur.” Hermione Hoby revisits the life and work of Betty Friedan. | The New Republic
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Antonia Hitchens reports from the spin room at the fourth Republican presidential debate. | The Paris Review
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“We are homesick not only for the places we left, but for the people we were when we left them.” Timothy C. Baker reflects on the way the books of our childhoods shape our understanding of the world. | The MIT Press Reader
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PSA for very wealthy Austenites: Austen’s annotated copy of Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature is up for auction. | Smithsonian Magazine
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Four Palestinian poets write in a time of catastrophe. | LARB
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“The superpower of the professional noticer may be a preternatural ability to ignore decisive realities in their own lives: facts, families.” Parul Sehgal considers what we can learn from the lives of critics. | The New Yorker
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Heven Haile talks to Ottessa Moshfegh about Anne Hathaway, adapting her own work, and avoiding easy answers. | GQ
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“The preoccupations of solitary characters populate the world even beyond side quests, existing for no purpose other than to make the game more representative of life.” On Zelda and the future of stories. | Public Books
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In Jon Fosse’s Nobel laureate speech, the author said that if he’d listened to critics, he would have stopped writing 40 years ago. Heartening! | The Guardian
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Sigrid Nunez shares what she’s reading and what she wants more of in literature. | The New York Times
Also on Lit Hub:
Rumaan Alam on seeing Leave the World Behind on screen • Dispatches from the Nairobi International Book Fair • December’s must-read poetry collections and sci-fi and fantasy books • Gabriel Bump reflects on rereading his novel in the midst of profound grief • When Homo sapiens became human • The 38 best books (new and old) that Lit Hub staffers read in 2023 • On the Velvet Underground’s “savagely indifferent” first album • Christian Wiman muses on conversion and repentance • Sara Franklin looks back on a year in reading children’s books (with her kids) • How bougainvillea colonized the world • Emmeline Clein on the new film adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen • The best Lit Hub stories of the year, according to us • A roundtable on teaching CRT and disputed literature today • On the hacker group that told Congress they could take down the internet • Jessica Moore on the dissolving margins of motherhood • Robyn Davidson on discovering her next adventure • When the culture wars came for Monty Python • How hot beverages became all the rage in 18th-century Britain • Why novelists should embrace artificial intelligence
