The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1899, Aksel Sandemose is born.
- “Crucially, The Living Mountain needs to be understood as a parochial work in the most expansive sense.” Robert Macfarlane on Nan Shepherd’s uniquely poetic memoir of life in the Cairngorm Mountains. | Lit Hub Criticism
- “I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.” Why Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper.” | Lit Hub Craft
- “The work is everything, and the work is heartbreaking.” Stuart Nadler on how the act of producing literature comes with deep ties to history. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Noliwe Rooks on the ongoing battle to desegregate schools across America throughout the 1960s. | Lit Hub History
- Janet Todd explores the origins and enduring appeal of Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Marcy Dermansky explains why being kind to yourself is the first step in any writing process. | Lit Hub Craft
- The joys of “catharsis,” “harpy,” and more: Natasha Pulley on her favorite Greek words. | Lit Hub On Translation
- Arielle Zibrak traces a short history of short fiction by American women. | Lit Hub Criticism
- “The letter he carries is dated March 1878 and brings the news that there is nothing to be done: the whaleship Dromo has been crushed by the ice in the Chukchi Sea.” Read from Ethan Rutherford’s novel, North Sun. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Kate Millar talks to Pádraig Ó Tuama about religious trauma, eros, and poetry as prayer. | Public Books
- “Thompson’s killer found a person to whom grievances could be presented, and delivered them in the American style: in bullet form.” Mark O’Connell on Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of a healthcare CEO. | New York Review of Books
- How medieval philosophical debates about angels laid the groundwork for modern physics. | Aeons
- “Would you rather have abundance or scarcity? Easy: more is better than less. What about abundance or scarcity of war?” Malcolm Harris considers Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance. | The Baffler
- With Simon Akam and Rachel Lloyd, Ben Okri discusses his early life in Nigeria and Britain, winning the Booker Prize, and his latest work. | Always Take Notes
- Eileen G’Sell considers the poetics of grief: “But grief, grief is truly sublime. It magnifies. It morphs. It is adolescent.”| Los Angeles Review of Books
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