TODAY: In 1984, Julio Cortázar dies.

• “Minor Detail had overwhelmed me, among other things, because of this: shame at how little I actually knew.” Gunnhild Øyehaug on reading Adania Shibli. | Lit Hub Criticism

• In conversation with Jordan Pérez: “When you’re perceived by the world as a woman, you most likely have this sense of constant alertness, of mistrusting the motivations of men, of being ready to fight for your survival at any moment.” | Lit Hub Craft
• Caroline Carlson recommends new children’s books by Katherine Marsh, Zohreh Ghahremani, Adam Gidwitz, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• “As I watched, I wondered—how many similar scenes of women writers at work had filmmakers captured, and what themes could I make out across them?” On representations of women writers in film and TV. | Lit Hub Film
• Nicki Kattoura on syntax and genocide: “The comma neatly separates a list of things that are completely entangled, and in the process obscures the degree of violence happening to each individual person.” | Lit Hub Craft
• Can slowing down help you reconnect with reading? Shannon Reed suggests that less is more. | Lit Hub Memoir
• “Candy’s own garden had for years been a pitiful thing. She called it her abomination. She liked to tell people about how badly it was coming. She used the word abomination as often as she could.” Read from Laird Hunt’s new collection, Float Up, Sing Down. | Lit Hub Fiction
• On Sheila Heti, diary as performance, and the relationship between technology and authorship:  “Heti’s experiments in computer-assisted writing reveal a degree of frustration with her own authorial perspective.” | The Walrus
• “You shouldn’t worry about how it’s going to be received. You should just tell the story you want to tell as truthfully and beautifully as possible.” Roxane Gay on Marguerite Duras and Kaveh Akbar on Amos Tutuola. | Publishers Weekly
• Moms for Liberty, one of the biggest organizations pushing book bans across the US, might be losing some steam. | The New Republic
• Did you hear? Reading’s cool again. Like, really cool. | The Guardian 
• “I was trained by poetry where you can just write ambience and atmosphere. But in a novel, if there’s not a story that people are interested in, with characters that they care about, they’ll close the book.” Dan Magers in conversation with Ben Fama. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “More so than for many writers, Sante’s is a syllabus self. To read her is to know she has done more interesting reading than you have.” Carl Swanson profiles Lucy Sante. | Vulture
• “Books are comforting, maybe especially when you’re growing up, because reading a story that has a main character you can identify with, and—crucially—an ending you already know, is cathartic.” Gal Beckerman on how his children reminded him to love reading. | The Atlantic