The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1895, Oscar Wilde sues the Marquess of Queensbury for defamation for criminal libel at the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, commonly known as Old Bailey. The trial does not go well.
- Get ready for the fun and the fantastical. Caroline Carlson recommends new children’s books by Maple Lam, Felicita Sala, Laurie Morrison and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- The collapse of Small Press Distribution has left over 400 publishers uncertain about the future. Adam Morgan talks to small press publishers about what happens next. | Lit Hub Bookstores
- “It struck me that the new, multicultural Shanghai I inhabited still retained many dynamics of these colonial novels.” Aube Rey Lescure considers what depictions of expat culture in China miss. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Allison Rudnick reveals how 19th century literary magazines pioneered a new kind of graphic design. | Lit Hub Art
- “She wants to protect the past from the prying eyes of the present, and the future.” On remembering and forgetting in modern Ireland. | Lit Hub Memoir
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Bothayna Al-Essa on opening a bookstore in Kuwait: “I wonder how much of a dreamer I was, and why—at the time—I didn’t see myself as a dreamer.” | Lit Hub Bookstores
- “A rough-looking man appeared out of the night, almost invisible in black clothes, and hustled us into a cove crowded with people.” Read from Helen Benedict’s new novel, The Good Deed. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Remembering Maryse Condé, who has died at 90. | The Guardian
- “Our culture tends to train us to understand police officers as enforcers of the law. But, a theme that runs throughout historiography of policing in the United States is the way that officers are trained to find and even construct criminality for themselves.” On the development of New York City as a police state. | Public Books
- Leslie Jamison considers the pop-psychification of gaslighting: “The popularity of the term testifies to a widespread hunger to name a certain kind of harm. But what are the implications of diagnosing it everywhere?” | The New Yorker
- When is a soap opera great literature? Maybe when it’s Dynasty. | The Walrus
- Revisiting Eliot Weinberger’s The Life of Tu Fu and considering a legacy of poetics. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Ella Glover and Mary O’Neill talk Ordinary zine and encouraging the masses to engage with media more slowly and with presence. | Dazed
