The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1852, Lady Gregory, Irish dramatist, folklorist, founder of the Irish Literary Revival movement, is born.
- Maris Kreizman on why politicians need to stop writing and start doing something instead. | Lit Hub Politics
- On the banning of Eric Carle’s Draw Me A Star: “What those who redact Carle’s childlike art probably don’t realize is that it was inspired by his own response to censorship growing up in Nazi Germany.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- “By all appearances—in the ten years since immigrating to Philadelphia in 1959—Vinent Conlon had settled into life as an average Irish-American dad.” Ali Watkins on the Americans who armed the IRA during The Troubles. | Lit Hub History
- “For Hawthorne, human transcendence is not going to be found in any trans-human state.” What Nathaniel Hawthorne can teach us about the plague of techno-optimism. | Lit Hub Technology
- “Gary resisted, celebrated, skewered, and suffered enormously.” Sam McKinniss on Gary Indiana. | The Paris Review
- Constance Grady on 100 years of (rereading) The Great Gatsby. | Vox
- Peter Coviello on the state of academia: “The story of the decimation of higher education over the past decades is well-told, as is the inset story of the decimation of the humanities.” | n+1
- David Cole considers how universities are responding to anti-DEI pressure from the Trump administration (not courageously, it turns out). | New York Review of Books
- ICE has detained Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder and a leader of the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University. | Democracy Now!
- “In Palestine, the obscurities one encounters are often the only things that can be experienced.” Max Weiss interviews Adania Shibli. | The Paris Review
- “Like many people, I imagined that smugglers were rich, were bad, that everybody hates them: all these really simplistic kinds of things.” Jason De León on telling the stories of human smugglers. | Public Books
- Isabella Hammad on reading Etel Adnan amid a genocide. | The Yale Review
- “Universities must recognize how anti-Palestinian racism threatens all of us.” Dima Khalidi considers the far-reaching implications of Mahmoun Khalil’s abduction. | The Nation
- “I hope that Bezos will hold to his commitment, and to his stalwart practice, during Trump’s first term, of not knuckling under to the President’s pressure campaign to interfere with news coverage.” Ruth Marcus discusses her decision to leave The Washington Post. | The New Yorker
- “Her approach to naming disability does not draw a dividing line between her disability and her personhood but instead interweaves the two.” Paige Aniyah Morris on people and disability in Kim Heejin’s No Matter How Odd. | Words Without Borders
- Adam Eli and Torrey Peters talk about writing, fascism, and the Great American Novel. | Interview
- “That’s what makes speculative fiction so powerful, it’s a genre that twists and subverts and amplifies. It can shake us awake.” Silvia Park and Kelly Link discuss the power of speculative fiction. | Reactor
- Meta has succeeded in blocking Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former employee, from “promoting or further distributing copies” of Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, her tell-all memoir about her time at the company. | The New York Times
- “Who is getting fired up to read this crap?” Tom Ley considers The Free Press. | Defector
Also on Lit Hub:
Catch up with our Best Villains in Literature bracket! • Jesmyn Ward on William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying • On Hayao Miyazaki’s radical depictions of childhood • The 19th-century historians who relativized the violent legacy of slavery • On biographers who struggle to find primary sources • Soccer and the legacy of the Hillsborough disaster • How Alanis Morissette gave a voice to her fans’s struggles • What it means to write like a girl • Authors answer our burning literary questions • Karen Russell on receiving a hotel ice bucket as a courtship gift • Bryan Charles on sharing a name with another author • The origins of an iconic American invention • “What injustices and possibilities are laid bare” in the wake of a natural disaster • Sloane Crosley on the art of saying “no” • On rewriting a novel after a decade of distance • Books for understanding African folklore • Will Rees on Franz Kafka’s health anxiety • Read two (very mean!) poems by Dorothy Parker • The practical and ethical ramifications of AI weapons • Where is the moral courage in the American media? • Why people fear IRL dystopia but love dystopian fiction • The moody uncanniness of Shirley Jackson’s stories • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • Check out Mónica de la Torre’s TBR • Read “Robert Creeley,” a poem by Ron Padgett • The White Lotus props master Michael Cory on how he picks books for the show • Today on the Lit Hub Podcast • Torrey Peters on why she’d build saunas if she wasn’t a writer • The utopian dreams of early 20th-century occultists • Alice Austen on writing character like an actor • The best reviewed books of the week • Books on migration that experiment with point of view • How Annie Besant foresaw that reproductive rights were worth fighting for • The origins and lasting impact of the Vietnam War
