TODAY: In 1926, Harper Lee is born.  

• Sam Weller on Ray Bradbury’s underappreciated classic: “The Martian Chronicles is a serious book about serious human themes. It is science fiction as a reflection of modernity.” | Lit Hub Criticism
• Milo Todd on tracing and preserving trans history while writing historical fiction. | Lit Hub History
• Forrest Gander talks to Poets.org about editing C.D. Wright and “enthusiasm for the magic of the word.” | Lit Hub In Conversation
• Alok A. Khroana examines William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road and the millennia-long cultural connections between India and Eurasia. | Lit Hub History
• “My auntie always hid in the front closet whenever they started shooting.” Read “Shots Fired on New Year’s Eve,” a poem by Ali Black from the collection We Look Better Alive. | Lit Hub Poetry
• Cutter Wood on Thomas Browne and the joys and possibilities of exploring the unknown. | Lit Hub Craft
• “Every now and again when I receive one of his emails, I’m always amazed at how brilliant and hilarious he is.” Harry Bliss on his close encounters with Sy Hersh. | Lit Hub Memoir
• “One day, not so very long ago, he caught himself looking at his face mirrored in the window of a small plane flying from Paris to Munich.” Read from Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s novel Separate Rooms, translated by Simon Pleasance. | Lit Hub Fiction
• Mitchell S. Jackson reads Shakespeare for the first time in his 40s: “[E]ven in this dogged culture war—no, especially in this fierce war for the rule of white culture—I’m claiming old William of Stratford as mines, too.” | Esquire
• What does it take to write a cookbook? Jenn Sit, editorial director of cooking at Clarkson Potter, talks culinary inspiration and new food canons. | Eater
• “Kemp’s concentration camps literalize gender expectations as compulsory, inescapable structures in which people aren’t individuals but representatives of an ideal.” Arielle Isack considers the heteropessimism of Sophie Kemp’s fiction. | The Baffler
• As Tomie dePaola’s Strega Nona turns 50, it’s finally time to show Big Anthony some appreciation. | The New York Times
• Lauren Markham and Jenny Odell discuss inspiration, the relationship between creativity and grief, and climate crisis. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “Adventure, transformation and change in Finn Family Moomintroll are both necessary and desirable, but they are also contained within a reassuring frame of reliable predictability.” Sue Walsh revisits Tove Jansson’s Moomin books. | The Conversation

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