The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1894, Anton Chekhov’s story “The Student” is published in Russkie Vedomosti.
- “I think this lack of clarity about money arises because the stories literary authors want to tell are fundamentally upper-middle and upper-class stories.” Naomi Kanakia wonders why we don’t talk about money in novels anymore. | Lit Hub Criticism
-
Véra Nabokov, darkly humorous sleaze, the woman behind Freud’s talking cure, and more! These 22 new books are out today. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
-
“It only made sense to use my writing, the very thing that saved my life, to potentially help another person in their time of grief and depression.” Brianna Pastor on the bittersweet experience of writing about grief and shame. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Elwin Cotman on rereading Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York on the road: “The more I read Janowitz, I’m convinced that laughter is the only way certain stories can be told.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- Lissa Soep chronicles the process of creating an emotionally authentic audiobook and giving a voice to the words of others. | Lit Hub Craft
- “But why do we automatically assume that other civilizations would even want to visit or communicate with us?” Lisa Kaltenegger considers Carl Sagan, alien equations, and how sci-fi can help us imagine extraterrestrial life. | Lit Hub Science
- Michael Korda on the literary and romantic camaraderie between Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. | Lit Hub History
- “Until then, on a call to his baby sister in the spring of 2017, Nayan had no clue what her name was.” Read from Sunjeev Sahota’s new novel, The Spoiled Heart. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Carole V. Bell explores our enduring fascination with Tom Ripley. | NPR
- “Rather than evade the question of intimacy in favor of tidy social and political arguments, Parks embraces its formidable complications.” Imani Perry profiles playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. | The New York Times Magazine
- Édouard Louis considers adaptation and argues against “a restrictive idea of identity as a property some of us own.” | Jacobin
- “Like many Palestinians, Saleem had never been to the place he came from.” Marcello Di Cintio remembers Saleem al-Naffar, the beloved poet who was killed in Gaza in December. | PEN Canada
- Simon van Zuylen-Wood attends the book party for Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. | New York Magazine
- “Weaponizing the idea of the family in crisis, the Right has idealized the perseverance of the traditional nuclear family as inseparable from the health of the nation’s economic future.” On taxes, labor, American neoliberalism, and Melinda Cooper’s Counterrevolution. | Los Angeles Review of Books
