The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1925, Edward Gorey is born.
- “The beginning of democracy requires a transport into a necessary fiction.” Judith Butler on why democracy needs the humanities. | Lit Hub Politics
- Gabrielle Bellot on how the linguistic erasure of trans people also erases them from history and life: “To only refer to “LGB” history, then, isn’t just a petty linguistic choice. It erases history, creating a new, bowdlerized version of that history instead, a revisionist past in which people like me were not present.” | Lit Hub
- What Robert Frost’s intellectual and literary influences reveal about his artistic philosophy. | Lit Hub Criticism
- What do Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, and Walt Whitman have in common? They self-published. | Lit Hub Craft
- Gabrielle Schwarz considers Elaine Aron and what it means to be a highly sensitive person. | Dirt
- “If language is consciousness and humans are a ‘place-loving species,’ then place-names—toponyms—may mold a larger piece of our minds than we think.” Joshua Jelly-Shapiro ponders naming as power, from the Gulf of Mexico to New York City’s streets. | Broadcast
- Hanif Abdurraqib considers Bartees Strange’s new album, Horror. | The New Yorker
- “It strikes me that neither my father nor I, nor the people encountered on this trip, nor my grandmother in that city in northern China, worship the past.” Aube Rey Lescure on returning to China. | Granta
- Sean Hooks talks to Claire Messud about This Strange Eventful History, art discourse, and “the amazing complexities of what we can express and convey in language if people will only make the effort and take the time.” | Public Books
- Mitch Anzuoni chronicles the search for The Spiritual Hunt, Rimbaud’s lost manuscript. | The MIT Press Reader
- “They are all-accommodating, embracing all interests, contradictions, revisions, distractions, irrelevances; they permit one to explore everything and release one from the burden of having to conclude anything.” Jared Marcel Pollen on Montaigne’s essays. | The Point
- Noor Anand Chawla considers the sociological impact of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. | JSTOR Daily
- Mark Greif explains why government employees should hold the line: “In a bureaucratic showdown, heroism need not be grandiose.” | n+1
- On Eduardo Torres and Augusto Monterroso’s The Rest is Silence. | The Baffler
- “His underlying point that no serious ideological competitor to liberal democracy would emerge stands strong.” Michael A. Cohen revisits Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History. | The New Republic
Also on Lit Hub:
The rise and fall of #girlboss feminism • The many literary afterlives of Jane Austen • Sarah Lyn Rogers examines the speaker as a mask in poetry • The hidden activist life of Betty Friedan • Jane Ciabattari talks to Elyse Durham • Drawing inspiration from Sergei Bondarchuk’s iconic War and Peace adaptation • On the political power of American countercultures • Rebecca Romney’s quest to unearth Jane Austen’s influences • Emily J. Smith meditates on emails from her dad • What novelists can learn from playing Elden Ring • How the Pilgrims influenced modern ideas about migration • The novelist to community organizer pipeline • How walking helped Simone and Hélène de Beauvoir make art • The prescient genius of WG Sebald’s Rings of Saturn • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • How Americans can keep the rising tide of fascism at bay • RaMell Ross on adapting Colson Whitehead • Are you the asshole if you think all book covers look the same? • The merits of escaping into old television • The psychology behind why humans need independence and connection • This week on The Lit Hub Podcast • How to be funny when writing a novel • How Jimmy Breslin and Langston Hughes reacted to the assassination of Malcolm X • The best reviewed books of the week • Neel Mukherjee talks to Eli Zuzovsky • How Little Richard brought Black and queer culture to American music • Read “Information Worker at the End of the World,” a poem by Stephanie Niu
