TODAY: In 1980, Jean-Paul Sartre dies at 74.
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Uncovering art history in Western Ukraine: Benjamin Balint recounts the unlikely discovery of Bruno Schulz’s fairy-tale murals. | Lit Hub Art
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“What had I done, insisting on more of us?” Maggie Smith on the anxious, silent first year of motherhood. | Lit Hub Memoir
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Jena Friedman asks her favorite male comedians—Jon Stewart, Reggie Watts, and Bob Odenkirk among them—some of the inane questions she gets as a “woman in comedy.” | Lit Hub Humor
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“A veritable maze of imagery, a labyrinth of connotation, a factory of concepts.” In praise of the long, complicated sentence. | Lit Hub Criticism
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Izumi Suzuki’s Hit Parade of Tears, Mark Bowden’s Life Sentence, and Molly Prentiss’s Old Flame all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
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Future shock: 8 crime novels that blur the lines into sci-fi. | CrimeReads
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“The books that he chooses for his annual reading list are all his personal choices.” How our most literary of presidents chooses what he’s going to read next. | Esquire
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Hollywood writers—half of whom are novelists at this point—are poised to go on strike. | The Daily Beast
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Inside the oldest children’s bookstore in America. | The Orange County Register
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Rachel Heng on the similarities between raising a child and writing a novel: “Both brought sleepless nights, an overwhelming sense of impossibility, the panicked feeling that I simply will not be able to do this, the bone-deep conviction that I must.” | The Atlantic
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Laurie Colwin’s child, R. F. Jurjevics, on discovering their mother’s previously unpublished story “Evensong.” | The New Yorker
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First they banned books, now the GOP wants to defund libraries. | MSNBC
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A look at the origins of Bookshop.org, and how it’s thriving (and helping indie bookstores) in Amazon’s world. | WIRED
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“Was the ‘artificially intelligent’ chatbot ripping me off, personally?” One writer’s deep reckoning with ChatGPT. | InsideHook
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Catherine Lacey recommends 10 “badly behaved” biographies. | The Guardian
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Rapid-fire book recs from Congresswoman Katie Porter. | ELLE
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Charles Dickens did a LOT for literature, but did he also come up with the first fictional android? | NewScientist
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“I had published the story in a half-baked state (in a literary magazine), and regretted it very much.” Haruki Murakami’s first novel in six years, a remix of a very old story, hits shelves in Japan today. | Kyodo News
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Will Lloyd wonders how male literary novelists became terminally uncool. | The New Statesman
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“I don’t want to publish just for the sake of publishing.” Don Winslow on retiring from writing to focus on activism. | New Zealand Herald
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“I’ve become more easily bored by plot. A little goes a long way.” Charles Frazier on his reading habits, favorite writers, and why some classics are better enjoyed later in life. | The New York Times
Also on Lit Hub:
Joy Harjo on being a poet and witness to history • Sophie Mackintosh considers the past as its own literary genre • Sasha Velour reflects on Ru Paul’s Drag Race and the thriving art form of drag • How the lyric essay became a site for resistance • Professional violinist Ling Ling Huang on the similarities between classical music and fiction writing • The metaphysical space within literature • Wartime humor in Ukraine • John Cotter on finding a new way to write about the self after losing his hearing • Why a young Sam Shepard vowed to never become his father • Andrew Porter on writing about growing older • Ryan McGee captures the carnival that is Minor League Baseball entertainment • The profound connections between math and poetry • Juliette Fay on writing complex older protagonists • Hanna Halperin on living with debilitating migraines • Omer Aziz on finding himself trapped between East and West in Jerusalem • Jeff Boyd on pursuing his dream of a writing career, even when it meant commuting • Cocktails inspired by Virginia Woolf and Zora Neale Hurston • Daphne Kalotay on the value of short fiction • Why the culture around Great Books is hostile to trans people • Musings on the scientific underpinnings of poetry