The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1844, Friedrich Nietzsche is born.
- “Life itself is the “blues”—life itself breaks our hearts, which is the price we must pay for its beauty and terror.” Joyce Carol Oates on writing her nostalgic novel, Broke Heart Blues. | Lit Hub Craft
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Anthony Bourdain chronicles the life and times of history’s most unexpectedly (in)famous cook: Typhoid Mary. | Lit Hub Food
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- “it’s been centuries inside this grief / & since, electricity in the home / then in the hands, but – still – the fields.” Read “relativity,” a poem by Danez Smith. | Lit Hub Poetry
- Daniel M. Lavery looks back at the rise and fall of women’s hotels in American cities: “To disappear in a large city is no especially difficult task, but to disappear without ever exciting remark requires careful accounting and economy of movement.” | Lit Hub History
- “How could she be expected to overcome the sorrow of being sent away from the family?” Maira Kalman on the remorse and powerlessness of losing a sister to forced separation. | Lit Hub Memoir
- An Anthony Bourdain rerelease, poetry by Mosab Abu Toha, and more! These 25 new books are out today. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- “Håkan Söderström was born on a farm north of Lake Tystnaden, in Sweden.” Read from Hernan Diaz’s first novel, In the Distance. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Cartoonists and Bernadette Magazine editors Angela Fanche and Katie Lane in conversation about friendship and comics publishing. | The Comics Journal
- Mohammed R. Mhawish remembers his friend Refaat Alareer. | The Nation
- Andrea Long Chu on the role of a literary critic during times of genocide. | Vulture
- “Han’s Nobel should be seen not just as a celebration of a global star who has emerged in the past decade but as an extension of the mission of this iteration of the prize.” Mark Krotov and Alex Shephard offer a Nobel postmortem. | The New Republic
- Among the 10,000 books banned in Texas prisons is a collection of letters written by incarcerated people themselves. | The Guardian
- On considering Ibsen while traveling in Norway. | The Washington Post
