The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1967, Joan Didion’s essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is published in The Saturday Evening Post.
- Joel Edward Goza tracks the literary and cinematic legacy of white supremacy in the United States by examining the books of Thomas Dixon. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Ken McGoogan on how Jack London’s The Iron Heel foresaw a future in opposition to democracy: “It remains possible that London’s three-century scenario…will prove more eerily prescient than anyone could have imagined.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- Liu Hong reflects on Puccini, Chinese operas, and tragedy in art and life. | Lit Hub Music
- “The more you observe, the more you will fall in love with the wild world that you belong to, too.” On the value of stillness and silence in all seasons. | Lit Hub Nature
- How do you deal with post-book blues? Lance Richardson offers advice and solidarity to writers struggling to find a sense of purpose between projects. | Lit Hub Craft
- “You could see the two sisters had passed through some unequivocal experience, which, though it might not interest others, had formed and indissolubly bound them.” Read from Shirley Hazzard’s novel, The Transit of Venus (and listen to a clip from the new audiobook). | Lit Hub Fiction
- Arundhati Roy will publish her first memoir, titled Mother Mary Comes to Me, next September. | The Guardian
- “With The Pornographer, McGahern, who attained literary fame as a martyr to a cruel and stifling patriarchal structure, appears to ask if a man can excuse himself from the house altogether.” Jessica Winter revisits John McGahern’s fathers. | The New Yorker
- Kasey Butcher Santana considers the marginalia of prison library books. | Split Lip
- “Somewhat unwillingly, Rooney has become an emblem of a (perhaps imaginary) millennial ethos, one in which that generation’s anticapitalist beliefs sit uneasily alongside its quiet but determined pursuit of a conventional life…that appears to be vanishing.” Andrea Long Chu on Sally Rooney. | Vulture
- On Dino Buzzati’s The Singularity and how technology has repositioned literature in the cultural zeitgeist. | 3AM
- Wordfreq, a project analyzing human language usage, has shut down because “generative AI has polluted the data.” | 404 Media
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