THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1919, F. Scott Fitzgerald gives the manuscript of This Side of Paradise to his friend Shane Leslie to deliver to Maxwell Perkins, editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York.
- Suzanne Roberts offers advice (and prompts!) for writing about sex. | Lit Hub Craft
- How does time actually work? Jim Al-Khalili explores the flow of physics. | Lit Hub Science
- These Latin American novels from the 1920s chronicled an era of agriculture and labor. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Eric T. Jennings introduces you to Edmond Albius, the enslaved man who pioneered the cultivation of the vanilla plant, from the Cundill Prize-shortlisted Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean. | Lit Hub History
- Chloe Benjamin recommends literary sci-fi and fantasy novels that offer hope by Ted Chiang, Susanna Clarke, Mohsin Hamid, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Marlon James’ The Disappearers, Jon Ronson’s The Castle, Chloe Benjamin’s Under Story, and Emily Wilson’s Crossing the Wine Dark Sea all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- Louise Brangan traces the stories of girls sent to work in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, from her Cundill Prize-shortlisted The Fallen: The Lost Girls of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and a Legacy of Silence. | Lit Hub History
- “Frank Meir has spent a lifetime running from his past, carefully concealing his heritage, though people did not seem to care.” Read from Philippe Collin’s debut novel, The Barman of the Ritz. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Nick Ripatrazone reports from the high school where he teaches, at the dawn of the phone ban era. | Slate
- “She is a writer of uncommon commitment to capturing the genie-soul of New Orleans. Her repetitions are the persistent attempts to meet and master its memory and essence.” Walker Rutter-Bowman on Nancy Lemann’s life and work. | The New Republic
- How Ray Reipen launched an iconic rock club and fostered Boston’s sonic counterculture. | The MIT Press Reader
- On that time Hans Christian Andersen crashed out on Charles Dickens’s lawn. | Aeon
- Three critics reflect on 25 years of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. | The New York Times
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