TODAY: In 1880, English poet Alfred Noyes is born.
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“I beg you to see what it is that we must save, and not to let the bigots and misogynists take it away from us again.” Watch Ursula K. Le Guin read about her illegal abortion as a college senior in 1950. | Lit Hub Biography
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Ottessa Moshfegh on Dinah Brooke’s 1973 novel: “If it weren’t such a pleasure to read, I’d say that Lord Jim at Home—read by a novelist, like me—was an instrument of torture. It’s that good.” | Lit Hub Criticism
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How Sally Ride became a household name. | Lit Hub Space!
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Terrell Tannen recalls trying to adapt Jim Harrison’s novels for Hollywood—and making a friend in Harrison along the way. | Lit Hub Memoir
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Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds, Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, and James Ellroy’s The Enchanters all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
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Mark Wheaton on finding empowerment and autistic representation in an unlikely source: Jason Voorhees. | CrimeReads
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The Pulitzer Prize board is amending its citizenship requirement in Books, Music, and Drama: “Those who have made the United States their longtime primary home” will now be eligible in those categories. | The Pulitzer Prizes
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“It is a little odd for a fictional narrator to be addressing another fictional character as an immediately identifiable historical figure.” Michael Wood considers the narrator of In Search of Lost Time. | Lapham’s Quarterly
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A history of Goody Two-Shoes, the protagonist of the first English children’s novel, published in 1765. | Smithsonian Magazine
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Clint Smith on Josiah Henson, the man Harriet Beecher Stowe said inspired her most famous character. | The Atlantic
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“Ironically, in writing about an environment I’d considered unworthy of literary depiction, I came up with something that interested readers for the first time.” Jeffrey Eugenides on the story behind The Virgin Suicides. | The Guardian
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Art Spiegelman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and more authors discuss how it feels to have their books banned. | Harper’s Bazaar
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Take a look at the history of the Atlanta-based Venus magazine, which “took the Black queer south to the world.” | JSTOR Daily
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“In bringing Homer back from antiquity, Wilson also had to bridge the chasm of time that has elapsed in English literature since the first full translation of the Odyssey.” Judith Thurman profiles Emily Wilson. | The New Yorker
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“Recovered Black modernist texts that rewrite the known historical narrative, Amiable with Big Teeth and Romance in Marseille offer a glimpse of a reclaimed Black future.” Gary Edward Holcomb considers Claude McKay’s legacy. | Los Angeles Review of Books
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“I’m interested in memoir, I’m interested in memory. But why are we memoirists? Publishing’s tendency is towards flattening.” Kate Zambreno and Larissa Pham in conversation. | The Nation
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“The wounds of Chile are deep, but regardless of how Chileans decide to deal with our trauma and conflicts, Allende’s legacy might have some bearing beyond the borders of his country.” Ariel Dorfman on Salvador Allende, 50 years after his death. | New York Review of Books
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“When this outrageous and, frankly, heretical love-and-mustache backstory was introduced in Death on the Nile, I almost threw my popcorn at the screen.” Two Agatha Christie nerds discuss the latest adaptations of her work. | LA Times
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New York City public schools are grappling with the question of how to teach children to read. | New York Magazine
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“The banality of evil, the normalisation of evil is now manifest in our streets, in our classrooms, in very many public spaces.” Arundhati Roy on the dismantling of democracy in India. | Scroll
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“Our only weapon in this fight is solidarity.” Alex N. Press interviews striking writer Alex O’Keefe. | Jacobin
Also on Lit Hub:
What Philip Larkin and Ted Lasso (and science) teach us about trauma • Zakiya Dalila Harris goes behind the scenes of The Other Black Girl TV adaptation • Here are the 106 books that critics think you should read this fall • Meet the army of horsewomen warriors in Afghanistan • On the disruptive, decolonizing imagery of Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau • In praise of climate stories that complicate the narrative • How to write about pets (when you’re not an animal person) • The feminist fight for women’s pockets • On the detrimental impact of AI on literacy and cognition • Celebrating the tenth anniversary of Marie NDiaye’s Self-Portrait in Green • Navied Mahdavian on confronting environmental degradation in the American West • How America’s criminal justice system was slowly privatized • James Frankie Thomas on discovering his trans identity while writing fiction • Nick Ripatrazone muses on the generative nostalgia of old manuscripts • The impact of nature and landscape on writing characters • On the enduring popularity of Marvel’s Fantastic Four • How gardens and stories can create space to breathe • Carol Dunbar on writing under a water tower • What Olga Ravn is reading now and next • Annie Berke revisits The Notebook adaptation, (nearly) 20 years later • Ten of Phaidon’s most innovative titles of the past century • An ode to midlife heroines