The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day

TODAY: In 1906, English author T.H. White, best known for his Arthurian novels, is born.
- On a cultural obsession with Patty Hearst and the fine line between writing other people’s traumas and exploiting them. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Rebecca Solnit shares some of her favorite objects: “Your whole life is a research expedition, collecting specimens and building your pattern-recognition skills as you accumulate experiences and ideas about them, or at least mine has been.” | Lit Hub Craft
- Rosie Stockton explores the tension between automotive poetics and the constraints of car-centric capitalism. | Lit Hub Craft
- May’s best book covers were all about pattern and texture, and Emily Temple rounds up some of our favorites. | Lit Hub Design
- “Everyone, no matter how powerful they may appear at any given moment, eventually weakens.” What our current fragile peace reveals about the forces of history. | Lit Hub History
- Are you the asshole if you’re upset about a workshop friend stealing the plot of your story? Probably not! Kristen Arnett answers this and more questions about awkward literary situations. | Lit Hub Advice
- On the advantages and pitfalls of being both a writer and J.R.R. Tolkien’s grandson. | Lit Hub Craft
- “A hundred pages in, I felt like I was developing Stockholm syndrome with this novel.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- Laura Leffler considers the faulty logic behind gendered expectations of goodness and why we need more unlikable women in fiction. | Lit Hub Craft
- “I’m cold. That’s what I wake up to at seven in the morning.” Read from Rita Halász’s novel Deep Breath, translated by Kris(Ten) Herbert. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Cartoonist Julia Gfrörer on why she couldn’t make a nice book if she wanted to. | The Comics Journal
- “THING was an avatar of the black, queer culture that ended up providing a basal layer of everyday speech.” Sasha Frere-Jones chronicles the life and times of an iconic zine. | The Baffler
- Four experts on public education in the US discuss the catastrophic implications of the dismantling of the Department of Education, now and in the future. | The Nation
- “This is a book about desire: the desire to survive, to be equal to the moment, and to know what your work is.” Kiese Laymon talks to Chi Rainer Bornfree and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan about The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once: A Pandemic Memoir. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Drew Zeiba talks to Lotus L. Kang about her poetry inspired artwork: “I love this idea of everything and nothing happening at once, and the mundane as a kind of performance.” | Interview
- Anna Juul explores the embarrassing nature of using LinkedIn. | The Dial
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