The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1963, Aldous Huxley dies.
- Read poet and organizer Jody Chan’s Giller Prize boycott speech: “Here, today, we throw our labour into the gears of the death machine.” | Lit Hub
- “When Lee left, she had only what she could take with her. She was young, naïve.” Kim Young on what she can learn from Lee McCarthy in an era of divorce novels. | Lit Hub Biography
- Maya Kessler praises the art of dialogue: “Put two people in a room together—it’s most likely that one of them is trying to achieve something.” | Lit Hub Craft
- Brian Castleberry talks to Mark Haber about distraction, intellectual adventure, and Haber’s novel, Lesser Ruins. | Lit Hub In Conversation
- Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Emmanuel Carrère’s V13, and Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s The Scapegoat all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- “Once considered the gold standard of formal elegance, Pope’s poetry now seems totally bizarre.” Ryan Ruby makes the case for why we (really) need Alexander Pope. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Bartle Bull explains how the ancient Sumerians developed the world’s oldest system of writing. | Lit Hub History
- “The ancient twins stood shoulder to shoulder at her doorstep, indistinguishable from each other right down to the matching salmon sport coats, as if in all their years they had never abandoned the habit of dressing alike.” Read from Miles Harvey’s debut story collection, The Registry of Forgotten Objects. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Anna North on why, even though kids are reading, “they’re not reading in the ways that they need to read in order to be prepared for the tasks of learning and critical thinking.” | Vox
- “Battles over books in school libraries have become emblematic of the country’s larger culture wars over race, historical revisionism and gender identity.” Jeffrey Fleishman considers the future of American book bans. | Los Angeles Times
- What actually happens when AI replaces journalists? The results are creepy. | Wired
- Adam Morgan talks to the creators and stars of the new Say Nothing adaptation about “how they turned a nonfiction masterpiece into an unforgettable TV series.” | Esquire
- What does Trump 2.0 mean for the publishing industry? Emily Gould investigates. | The Cut
- Merve Emre revisits Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. | The Yale Review
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