TODAY: In 1947, Kenneth Arnold claims to have seen nine flying saucers near Mount Rainier, Washington, driving enthusiasm for science fiction literature. 

• What The Great Gatsby’s “glittering, gin-soaked indictment of how wealth, class, and social polish warp the distribution of power” can tell us about the absurd fiction of legal equality in America. | Lit Hub Politics
• Sally Ventura remembers one of America’s earliest modern school shootings in Olean, New York. | Lit Hub History
• Rebecca Grant chronicles how Mexican feminists fought for reproductive freedom at home and throughout the world. | Lit Hub Health
• Steven W. Thrasher considers how Mahmoud Khalil and Zohran Mamdani show us a better way through the politics of vulnerability. | Lit Hub Politics
• The 22 new books out today include titles by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, and André Aciman! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• “The newfound state of Hollywood as a willing participant in its own strict regulations was a great irony as well, one of epochal proportions.” How the Hays Code took the sex out of Hollywood. | Lit Hub Film
• Dwyer Murphy recommends five uncanny literary mysteries set in coastal Massachusetts. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Pamela Newton examines the impact of Sarah Ruhl’s play Eurydice as a revival hits the off-Broadway stage. | Lit Hub Criticism
• “Love and toxicity are hardly unfamiliar bedfellows.” Hal Ebbott tells Jane Ciabattari about writing a novel of male friendship. | Lit Hub In Conversation
• Fran Littlewood recommends tales about sisters by Alison Espach, Katherine Mansfield, the Brothers Grimm, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• “They had come from the hills behind the compound, south of the tennis court, slipping through a gap in the fence in the early morning.” Read from Aisling Rawle’s debut novel, The Compound. | Lit Hub Fiction
• Anslem Berrigan reflects on the legacy of his mother, Alice Notley. | Interview
• Decca Muldowney chronicles the fight between fanfiction writers and AI. | The Verge
• Elisabeth Egan considers the latest trend in cover art: “blaringly bright type in a sans-serif font atop a painting, usually a few centuries old.” | The New York Times
• “Something fascinating occurs if you start to think how the biosphere, as a total system of interactions between lifeforms and their habitats, is also like the inside of a dreaming head.” Timothy Morton considers the connection between our mental and ecological health. | The MIT Press Reader
• Irene Velentzas talks to cartoonist and illustrator Peter Kuper about insects, Kafka, and the “prophetic nature of art and literature.” | The Comics Journal
• “I think it’s interesting that to this day, a lot of mainstream understandings of the causes of this twinned economic and ecological collapse, the Great Depression and Dust Bowl drought, omit colonial violence.” Anna Marie Cain interviews Karen Russell. | Los Angeles Review of Books

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