The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1894, Aldous Huxley is born.
- Justin Muchnick on his favorite novel of the Olympics: “Alexias is a universal sporting figure—and yet, because he is simultaneously Renault’s creation, he is also a unique one.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- “Without questions and doubts, without cataclysms and conflagrations, without volatility and unpredictability and turmoil, how would we create?” In praise of literary chaos. | Lit Hub Craft
- “At some time in the far distant future there was a very popular game—a total waste of time—that young people loved to play, much to the chagrin and occasional outrage of their parents.” Read from César Aira’s Festival & Game of the Worlds. | Lit Hub Fiction
- It’s about time: the Cambridge Dictionary adds “boop,” “the ick,” and more of your favorite meme phrases. | The Guardian
- On the life-changing power of memorizing a poem. | The Washington Post
- Christopher Benfey considers the parallels between Moby-Dick and “a dark time…like our own.” | New York Review of Books
- “There is a story we tell ourselves about beauty—that it is worth the pain. But true, abidingly resplendent beauty lies in the fact that, despite such harms, in the face of them, even against them, we continue to seek a better world.” Manjula Martin on Olivia Liang and the radical potential of gardening. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Revisiting R.L. Stein’s One Evil Summer: “There is no shortage of bizarre stories and credulity-straining plot twists in ‘90s teen horror books.” | Reactor
- Jennifer Feeley on translating some of Hong Kong’s most interesting literary voices. | Asymptote
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