TODAY: In 1923, Joseph Heller is born.  

• “To rule as a Caesar was to stand as an actor upon the great stage of the world.” Tom Holland examines the legacies of ancient Rome’s most famous emperors. | Lit Hub History
• “Peppa Ryan swiveled around for the third time, looking for something, anything, familiar.” Read from Marcia Butler’s new novel, Dear Virginia, Wait for Me. | Lit Hub Fiction
• Zorimar Rivera Montes meditates on resilience, exhaustion, and Puerto Rican poetics. | Public Books
• Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses family history, otherness, and the first 100 days of the second Trump administration. | Democracy Now!
• Incarcerated journalist John J. Lennon on the real cost of true crime to prisoners. | Vulture
• “What’s undeniable is that 4chan helped form the content ecosystem as we know it.” Kyle Chayka on the life, death, and disastrous legacy of the infamous imageboard. | The New Yorker
• Apparently, parents don’t like reading with their kids? Weird! | The Guardian
• “It is the daily, diaristic churn that gives her unloosed first novel the sense of a fully textured fictional world.” Anne Enright examines the relationship between Helen Garner’s fiction and her diaries. | London Review of Books

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