The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1896, Dodie Smith, English children’s novelist and playwright best known for the novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians, is born.
- “our concealer, we call it industrial lighting, / with no desire to feed another, with ten free articles / monthly remaining, our headshots appearing.” Read Peter Mishler’s poem “Tunnel Vision,” from his new collection Children in Tactical Gear. | Lit Hub Poetry
- This isn’t the first time students have occupied Hamilton Hall. Charles Kaiser considers the 1968 protests at Columbia. | Lit Hub Politics
- “In post-war West Germany, it seemed, even the Nazi hunters had a Nazi past.” Tobias Buck on collective complicity and transitional justice in post-war Germany. | Lit Hub History
- Read Dorothy Chan’s poem “Designer,” from the collection Return of a Chinese Femme: “Like Flavor Flav taking Sweetie to Red Lobster on their first date, during the first season of Flavor of Love.” | Lit Hub Poetry
- Rachel Khong’s Real Americans, Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest, and Karen Valby’s The Swans of Harlem all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- “In truth, I hunger for books about nature and science by women.” Rebecca Kormos on the changing face of nature and climate narratives. | Lit Hub Nature
- “When I think about it too much, it comes out like shit.” Read from Stacy Skolnik’s new novel, The Ginny Suite. | Lit Hub Fiction
- In the style of Joe Brainard, Jonathan Lethem reflects on his friendship with Paul Auster. | The Guardian
- Francesca Mancino considers the ethics of rare book collecting. | The Atlantic
- “They speak still for those whose treatment fails, and those for whom treatment is neither available nor affordable.” Kay Redfield Jamison on personal accounts of depression and mania, from Lord Byron to Anne Sexton. | The MIT Press Reader
- John Guillory considers the future of literary criticism: “I wanted to show ultimately that there was something odd, something anomalous about this discipline of literary criticism…” | Public Books
- On Marie Howe as “a poet of the unbearable.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
- What happens when writers lose access to Google Docs? We get to talk about corporate tech and content moderation. | Wired
