The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1940, Charles Lindbergh is elected president, beating out Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America.
- Jadie Stillwell and Nicole Blackwood sleuth for answers about Nancy Drew (at a Nancy Drew convention). | Lit Hub Criticism
- A brief history of everyone’s favorite four letter word: “That fuck is at the same time one of the most notorious, popular, and emotive words in the language makes it all the more fascinating…” | Lit Hub History
- “The horror of Pynchon’s vision is not merely that we’re all victims of obsessive plots, but that we’re all obsessive builders of them.” Jonathan Rosenbaum revisits his review of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Ann Patchett, Oliver Sacks, and more! These 20 new books are out today. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Peter Ames Carlin on how R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe found camaraderie at art school. | Lit Hub Music
- “He’s in the ‘legend’ space, as far as can I tell.” Dave McMenamin on how Nathaniel S. Butler built a career capturing basketball’s greatest moments on film. | Lit Hub Photography
- “I am sure that my sense of form was essentially shaped by the months of working at Bach’s strict forms.” Rosemarie Waldrop reflects on her (not literary) influences. | The MIT Press Reader
- Writer and translator Persa Koumoutsi discusses translating literature from Arabic to Greek and a renewed global interest in Palestinian literature. | Asymptote
- On the challenges of operating a radical bookstore in Miami. | Jewish Currents
- Alan Jacobs on W.H. Auden’s journey from Britain to America and back: “Almost as soon as he arrived in New York, he began to rethink his calling as a poet, and, moreover, to reconsider the social role and function of poetry.” | The Hedgehog Review
- “I was like ‘Well, if these people get to express their point of view, I guess we should be allowed to express ours.’ And that was to me a big part of deciding to start the magazine.” The editors of World War III Illustrated on the anthology’s 45-year history. | The Comics Journal
- The largest publisher in the Netherlands is planning to use AI to translate “a limited number” of its books into English. | The Guardian
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