The Rings of Power, like The Lord of the Rings, reeeally wants us to believe in the divine rights of royalty. (Nah!) | Lit Hub Film & TV
“Writer’s block seems to me like such a masculine concept. Get an enema, please.” Rabih Alameddine on re-reading books, being a lazy bum, and Tom Hardy. | Lit Hub Questionnaire
Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell on the long history of women’s tennis attire attracting—and provoking—fashion drama. | Lit Hub Sports
Piety and profits: How Christianity led to the rise of capitalism in Medieval Europe. | Lit Hub History
Yurina Yoshikawa connects the dots between Nathan Fielder’s HBO docuseries The Rehearsal and its literary autofiction predecessors. | Lit Hub Film & TV
Brian McDonald recounts the riots and rivalries that led to the birth of the New York City Fire Department. | Lit Hub History
INTERVIEW WITH AN INDIE PRESS: Doug Seibold of Agate Publishing answers questions about the last two decades of independent publishing. | Lit Hub
Stephen King’s Fairy Tale, Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, and Edward Enninful’s A Visible Man all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
Je Banach on the books whose introductions offer special insight into literary classics, from Brandon Taylor on Edith Wharton’s The Writing of Fiction to Sally Rooney on Natalia Ginzburg’s All Our Yesterdays. | The Atlantic
How book bans upended one Texas town. | The New York Times
Exploring the campus novel roots of the Dark Academia aesthetic. | JSTOR Daily
“One of the reasons I wrote that book was because I kept noticing things that made me think, ‘Didn’t we do this? Aren’t we over this already?’” James Hannaham talks about blending tragedy with absurdity. | Interview
