The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1957, C. S. Lewis marries Joy Davidman in a Christian ceremony at her bedside in the Churchill Hospital in Oxford, England.
- Should you start writing under the stars? Annabel Abbs-Streets on how night skies inspire creative thoughts. | Lit Hub Science
- James Goodhand recommends Kate Atkinson, Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Georgi Gospodinov, and more books about time travel. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- “The routine was not all that remarkable for her, but from the outside looking in, it felt momentous.” Mia Manzulli considers proximity, distance, and living next to Joyce Carol Oates. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Sanibel Chai on why Erewhon is the worst name for an overpriced grocery store: “Given the book’s scathing commentary on obsessive fixation on health, I have to wonder what Ohsawa loved about Erewhon and what compelled Yokoyama to name a non-ironic business after it.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- “By weaving in folklore and ample wonder, Téa Obreht gives her climate fiction ancient roots.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- “We took pride in the fact that we made it from one season to the next, our aged roof holding despite the heavy fall of snow and the wash of rain.” Kao Kalia Yang on sharing the Hmong refugee experience. | Lit Hub Memoir
- “In the bright light of the kitchen table, / I watch Amá take a thin blade. Cuts out / numbers from a card, transfers them to another.” Read “La Doppelgänger,” a poem from Saul Hernandez’s new collection, How to Kill a Goat & Other Monsters. | Lit Hub Poetry
- “Piglet was sweating, and the supermarket chill was welcome on her breastbone, her back.” Read from Lotte Hazell’s new novel, Piglet. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Barbi Marković on disrupting middle class monotony in her writing, the final years of Yugoslavia, and life as horror. | The Guardian
- “Nowadays when we speak of Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, we mostly refer to its more reputable side.” How the printing press facilitated the spread of misinformation and salaciousness, and what the power of circulation means today. | Public Books
- Byung-Chul Han on the disenchantment of the world: “Time is becoming increasingly atomized. Narrating a story, by contrast, consists in establishing connections.” | The Paris Review
- Hugh Ryan’s When Brooklyn Was Queer is getting an Elliot Page-produced VR adaptation. | them
- “I am committed to the idea that there is something, aside from utility, in the excess and play of imagination that fantasy allows as a genre.” Kelly Link on “worthwhile frivolity,” adolescence, and romance. | The New Yorker
- “The slides seemed like items you might find in a witch’s hut or an old apothecary shop: supplies for potions and spells.” Leslie Jamison writes about how antique medical slides helped her imagine a future. | The Yale Review
