The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1917 Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, is born.
- How do you tackle writer’s block? Leslie Jamison, Rumaan Alam, and more share their strategies. | Lit Hub Craft
- “Language as something bold and entirely our own, something we can, as contributor Jessie Ren Marshall writes, build ‘from the rubble.’ Something we can queer.” Ten debut LGBTQ+ authors on the books that shaped them as writers. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- “At the back of this closet…was a paper bag and in the paper bag was an unbound copy of a very strange document—a long genealogy called The Story of the Bloods.” John Kaag on the Bloods, the little-known dynasty that shaped American life. | Lit Hub History
- “I erased my contacts. / First my digital extremities, / then each node in the spindling network.” Read Zoë Hitzig’s poem “Exit Muse” from the collection Not Us Now. | Lit Hub Poetry
- Barrie Kreinik on how Eva Le Gallienne revolutionized early 20th-Century theater: “The work of the theatre is ephemeral, but sometimes its lost treasures can be revived.” | Lit Hub Biography
- “There used to be too many things anyway— / Plans and people and places to go.” Read Michael Lista’s poem “Auld Lang Syne” from the collection Barfly. | Lit Hub Poetry
- We can’t know if Sweden’s Queen Christina would have embraced the world lesbian, but we do know that modern lesbians have embraced her. | Lit Hub History
- Sarah Perry’s Enlightenment, Carrie Courogen’s Miss May Does Not Exist, and Joseph O’Neill’s Godwin all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- “I’ve never felt as alive as I did that summer. Alive, needed, run off my feet.” Read from Sarah Gilmartin ‘s new novel, Service. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “It’s not what somebody expects a Cuban poet to write about.” Poet Víctor Rodríguez Núñez and translator Katherine M. Hedeen on the challenge of bringing an English translation of Rodríguez Núñez’s midnight minutes to print. | Asymptote
- On Rachel Cusk and “the ontological potential of an artistic object as a literary device.” | 3:AM
- Mike Duncan revisits Edward Gibbon’s masterpiece, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. | The New Republic
- Nathan Tavares on San Francisco’s AutoErotica, the last bookstore of its kind. | Esquire
- “If she has the slightest problem with the blacklisting itself and its potential effects on her cherished free-speech ideals, she doesn’t hint at that in the column.” Ben Burgis responds to Pamela Paul. | Jacobin
- Jeremy Butman considers memory (and hypnosis). | The Paris Review
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