May 13 – 17, 2024 ‹ Literary Hub

The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day

TODAY: In 1953, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain is published.

“She wrote for everyone who has let the sharp edge of regret dull into a daily ache, who has been surprised by love, by need, by the desire for more.” Jonny Diamond on seeing his mother in Alice Munro. | Lit Hub Criticism
This one’s for the Yinzers. Ed Simon on the Glaswegian origins of Pittsburghese. | Lit Hub History
What happens when you adopt a constitutional lifestyle? You might end up parading around Manhattan with a musket. | Lit Hub Politics
Jessica Shattuck recommends a reading list of of the 1960s’ and 1970s’ protest movements to understand activism today. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
Who are campuses meant to be safe for? “Students aged 19 or 20 found themselves under attack by men in their thirties and forties, some claiming to have had military or paramilitary training.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
Alexandra Alter visits The Lynx, Lauren Groff’s new bookstore. | The New York Times
“If our friends, or our partners, find out that we consider the privacy of our attention at least slightly sacred, to the extent that it still belongs to us, so much the better.” Lillian Fishman considers the read receipt. | Granta
Where are bookbinders hanging out these days? TikTok. | The Guardian
Jacob Silverman revisits Computer Power and Human Reason, the 1976 book and “moral guiding light” by the man who invented the chatbot. | The New Republic
Graduate student reporter Deeva Gupta shares a firsthand account of the The Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia. | n+1
“Any story that’s going to be any good is usually going to change.” Read Alice Munro’s 1994 interview with Jeanne McCulloch and Mona Simpson. | The Paris Review
Kathleen Hanna and Brontez Purnell discuss trauma, memoir, and birthday twins. | Interview
“Aristotle pondered why it was always the thoughtful ones, like poets, artists, and philosophers (himself included), who succumbed.” A brief history of melancholy. | The MIT Press Reader
“For nearly a century, the oil and gas industry has been obsessed with controlling its image in the media, especially in outlets that cater to elite audiences.” How oil companies manipulate journalism. | The Nation
Brad Phillips on obsession, addiction, and Scrabble: “This morning, before breakfast, I played nineteen games of Scrabble on my phone.” | The Paris Review
“Although Munro, who died Monday at 92, rarely depicted the sex explicitly…she wrote with such definite shading of looks and sound and erotically registered detail that you feel the shape of the sex more than you read it.” On how Alice Munro wrote sex. | Vulture
“What would it mean to interrogate labor as the engine behind conglomerate publishing and the core of its systemic failure?” Miriam Gordis on publishing’s labor crisis. | Verso
Read an open letter by a group of students who faced administrative discipline for participating in Harvard’s Gaza solidarity encampment. | Public Books