The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1967, Carson McCullers dies.
- Lana Lin reconsiders the expectations of memoir and re-envisions the classic cover of Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. | Lit Hub Craft
- Ilan Stavans and Peter Gilliver discuss the art of creating a dictionary: “The size of the task of compiling a comprehensive dictionary…has now grown far beyond what a single individual could hope to achieve in a lifetime.” | Lit Hub In Conversation
- Martha A. Sandweiss unearths the hidden history of power, privilege and violence behind a 19th-century photograph, from her Cundill Prize-shortlisted Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West. | Lit Hub History
- Nelly Klos recommends 10 translated titles that uplift Ukrainian voices by Stanislav Aseyev, Maria Matios, Victoria Amelina, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Christopher C. Gorham recounts how Picasso saved Matisse’s paintings from Nazi art thieves. | Lit Hub Art
- What do we learn from mythology? “Every rule, every value, was created by the consensus of adults, and adults will discard those rules and values when it suits them.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- “I had been on family vacations as a child. I had been on a bus to Omaha. I had been on the train to Kansas.” Read from George Whitmore’s iconic novel, Nebraska. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “Reading them in the bright quiet of morning, with an attentive child, feels like childhood itself.” Nausicaa Renner on the children’s series Sato the Rabbit. | The New Yorker
- Tajja Isen considers publishing’s gambling problem: “There is tremendous pressure to succeed from the beginning. If they fail, all bets are off, sometimes literally.” | The Walrus
- “Now I think the novel is a masterpiece; Eileen Chang’s oeuvre would be impoverished without it.” Zhang Yueran revisits Eileen Chang’s Little Reunions. | The Paris Review
- Arthur C. Clarke, scuba diver? On the author’s overlooked underseas adventures. | JSTOR Daily
- “In writing about snails, I wanted to write about slowness and strangeness, solitude and death, hibernation and estivation.” Lauren Bastide considers snails. | The Dial
- Read two poems about the cycle of war and suffering by Sudanese poet and essayist Essam Eisa Rajab. | Words Without Borders
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