The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1850, Alfred Tennyson marries his childhood friend Emily Sellwood at Shiplake.
- “Aspiring comedians would have to have thicker skin than aspiring novelists.” Adam Ehrlich Sachs talks to Camille Bordas about what writing workshops can learn from stand up comedy. | Lit Hub In Conversation
- L.S. Stratton on “Godmother” Charlotte Osgood Mason and what white women’s patronage of Black Harlem Renaissance artists exposes about race in America. | Lit Hub History
- “While censorship was still robust, science fiction and dystopic fantasy enabled cutting political and social commentaries to fly under the radar.” Lai Wen on sci-fi and the need for Chinese protest literature today. | Lit Hub Politics
- “Rachel Cusk’s repeated attempts to exterminate the novel while still writing one are genuinely impressive.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- “Each moment of recognition was only possible because of the specific choices of an individual bureaucrat.” On what it means to search for queerness in state records. | Lit Hub History
- Who’s the worst dad in literature? Garth Risk Hallberg on the most dysfunctional fathers of the Western canon. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Eight-time winner Lawrence Wood is here to teach you how to win The New Yorker’s Caption Contest. | Lit Hub Craft
- “When they opened the door for him, he walked right past without saying hello, went up the stairs, reached the room at the far end of the house, collapsed on the bed, and slipped into a coma.” Read from Fernando Vallejo’s novel The Abyss, translated by Yvette Siegert. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Yiyun Li examines the secret lives of movable type punctuation. | The Dial
- “There may be fewer dogs on the internet these days, but there are an awful lot of writers. And some of them are very online.” On the trajectory of internet writing. | The Baffler
- May Wang explores what olive trees mean to Palestine. | JSTOR Daily
- “When I die I am going to ask her some questions about the lesbian thing.” Patricia Lockwood on A.S. Byatt’s life and work. | London Review of Books
- In her acceptance speech for the 2024 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature, Marcia Lynx Qualley considers the work of translation in a time of violence. | Words Without Borders
- Who needs Coachella when you have Clownchella, the absurdist clowning festival that only costs $16 per ticket. | The Paris Review
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