The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day

TODAY: In 1896, Mary “Mamie” Dickens, daughter of Charles Dickens and editor of her father’s first collection of letters, dies.
- Benjamin Balthaser on Mike Gold, Alexander Bittelman, and the historical erasure of Jewish working-class anti-Zionism. | Lit Hub Politics
- Why, in an age of book bans and assaults on public libraries, indie booksellers are more essential than ever. | Lit Hub Bookstores
- “Although people often believe that borders are designed to keep others out, more often, it is us that they keep trapped in.” Melody Glenn takes an expansive lens to the opioid epidemic. | Lit Hub Health
- Aron Solomon unpacks how democracy took the hit in a struggle against algorithms. | Lit Hub Technology
- Terry Nguyen explores faith, desire, and the literary landscape of conversion experiences. | Lit Hub Religion
- “There can be no dispute about how fortuitous it is that we are here today as free, conscious entities, able to think and experience and love.” Simon Boas considers the ways fate, circumstance and privilege influence how we live. | Lit Hub Memoir
- “I prophesied spring’s early arrival. I prophesied the word diabetes in the movie theater, a whole minute before it happened. Is that improbable? Science fictional? No.” Read from Michael Clune’s new novel, Pan. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Helen Chazan asks, what makes a comic transgressive? | The Comics Journal
- Sarah Blackwood revisits Work: A Story of Experience, the feminist workplace novel in which Louisa May Alcott “asks what counts as freedom for women.” | The New Yorker
- “This is what the rivers told me: that life is always and utterly lived in flow and in relation.” Robert Macfarlane and Terry Tempest Williams in conversation. | Orion
- Lola Seaton on Sheila Heti and the illusion of effortlessness. | New York Review of Books
- Sarah E. Bond examines the far-right’s obsession with ignoring antiquity’s queerness. | Hyperallergic
- “I’m scared of it.” Josh Rottenberg talks to screenwriters about AI. | Los Angeles Times
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