The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1815, after burning down, the Library of Congress is reestablished when Thomas Jefferson sells the bulk of his book collection to the United States government for $23,950.
- How Trump’s unconstitutional federal funding freeze put libraries (and everything else) at risk: “They are not afraid to threaten vast swathes of vulnerable Americans—the point is to be cruel and to punish.” | Lit Hub Politics
- “When I think about it, tucking the label / back into my husband’s shirt / is not that different from eating him.” Read two poems by Maria Ferguson from the collection Swell. | Lit Hub Poetry
- “Yet loss is not an artillery shell. It defies physics. It is a feeling waiting, often impatiently, for insight.” Lea Carpenter considers fire and the stories we tell to fill life’s empty spaces. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Colors, textures, and more: These are our 14 favorite book covers from January. | Lit Hub Design
- “How terrible yet edifying to admit that for me, escapist art is anything that makes me forget about my phone for a while.” Maris Kreizman on why it’s okay to escape sometimes. | Lit Hub Criticism
- From Colm Tóibín to Sheila Heti, these 25 paperbacks are coming in February. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- “I’ve seen sex written about with passion and dispassion, but seldom in the same book, and never in the same sentence.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- What’s in Pádraig Ó Tuama’s TBR pile? Margaret Atwood, Feargal Ó Béarra, Vona Groarke, and more. | Lit Hub Criticism
- “Ari had been feeling itchy and bored of Elliot and his university friends. They were so achingly earnest.” Read from Lotte Jeffs’ novel, This Love. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Katherine Rundell considers the enduring appeal of children’s books. | London Review of Books
- Kim Beil shares her (occasionally cryptic) running diaries. | The Paris Review
- “Where could I find the queen of the second wave, the woman of staunch convictions and serious ideas, in the book’s embrace of the superficial and silly?” On Gloria Steinem’s often forgotten first book. | Public Books
- How Victorian writers and thinkers reconciled religion and science in a post-On the Origin of Species world. | JSTOR Daily
- Bring back the duel: David Wesley Williams argues for settling quarrels with dignity. | The New York Times Magazine
- “Oh my god. I don’t know how comfortable I am thinking of ourselves as the big dog. But I hope that we are handling the responsibility of it in an ethical, kind, and fun way.” Jason Bergman talks to Silver Sprocket’s Avi Ehrlich about being “a radical comics publisher.” | The Comics Journal
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