The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1998, Icelandic author, poet, playwright, and Nobel Prize laureate Halldór Laxness dies.
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“Humans are sensory beings, and the Moon is a place devoid of any familiar sensory experience.” Rebecca Boyle on space dust and awe. | Lit Hub Space
- The internet proved itself to be “the greatest perceived threat” to corporate copyright holders after its invention. Have these stakeholders managed to control the spread of content online? | Lit Hub Technology
- “Lots of the connoisseurs I was meeting spent surprisingly little time analyzing the artworks themselves and instead seemed to outsource their opinion of the work to ‘context.’” Bianca Bosker on understanding art from the painter’s perspective. | Lit Hub Art
- How Stanley Kubrick made one of the most memorable horror films in the canon by translating Stephen King’s The Shining from page to screen. | Lit Hub Film
- Allen C. Guelzo considers how Abraham Lincoln defined democracy. | Lit Hub History
- Five book reviews you need to read, including Samuel Rutter on Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy and Catherine Lacey on Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries. | Lit Hub Book Marks
- “On film the divers resembled gods with their harpoons and fit bodies, the wetsuits that made them smooth, nonhuman.” Read from Hanna Johansson’s new novel, Antiquity. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “What if Turing’s hypothetical thinking machine had been a poet instead of a gamer? Maybe the more pressing question is, Why couldn’t it be both?” On poetics and pixels. | Public Books
- How a beloved community bookstore rose from literal ashes in New York’s Chinatown. | Publishers Weekly
- As internet creators race to coin trending slang, the competition at least “exemplifies a deep appreciation for language among the extremely online.” | Vox
- Stonewall Book Award winner, actress, and transgender activist Cecilia Gentili has died. | Them
- “A good lyric poem, after all, takes toil. Sometimes a poem will fall out of the sky fully formed like a meteorite, but such cosmic events, though real, are rare. A good lyric poem also takes a toll.” Jason Guriel on his challenging relationship with lyric poetry. | The Millions
- A candidate running for Secretary of State in Missouri burned challenged books with a flamethrower and posted the video online. She isn’t the only thing book advocates in the state are dealing with. | Book Riot
- Grace Byron wonders: “Why are so many trans novels written in the present tense?” | The Baffler
