THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1873, Paul Verlaine shoots and wounds Arthur Rimbaud.
- Zach St. George explores the wild scams of Australia’s snake venom con men. | Lit Hub History
- How activists Kevin Tubbs and Jacob Ferguson brought environmental liberation of the fae variety to America. | Lit Hub Climate Change
- “During his years in exile, Osip Mandelstam was denied the right to work for any publication or publishing house; translation jobs were cancelled, his writing went unpublished.” The parallels between the terror of Stalin and the terror of Trump. | Lit Hub History
- David Baerwald considers the writing lessons he learned from Hans Zimmer. | Lit Hub Craft
- “At each turn, Kathy’s voice—with the depth and texture of her experience—was already missing.” Jo Scott-Coe on Kathy Leissner, the overlooked first victim of the University of Texas tower shooting. | Lit Hub Biography
- “I could get some work done /vhere, I shrugged; / I had done it before.” Read “Boardinghouse With No Visible Address,” a poem by Franz Wright from the collection Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments. | Lit Hub Poetry
- Rachel Aviv’s You Won’t Get Free of It, Daniel Mason’s Country People, and David Thompson’s A Sudden Flicker of Light all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- “The next morning, Steven suffered through his undergrad fiction workshop with a hangover; three drinks had, sometime in the last few years, become a daylong punishment.” Read from Teddy Wayne’s new novel, The Au Pair. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “The trustees are unconstrained in making expedient but foolish choices because those who offer critiques and counter-proposals simply don’t matter.” Gregg Gonsalves on the higher education revolution we need. | The Nation
- Casey Cep considers the genius of Jon Klassen. | The New Yorker
- Rachel Aviv talks to Lucy McKeon about the relationships between parents and children and her new book, You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters. | Broadcast
- The era of AI isn’t the first time automation has tried to invade classrooms, and it hasn’t gone well in the past. | The MIT Press Reader
- Abigail Susik explores the pessimism of André Breton. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Hua Hsu traces the past and future of Silicon Valley’s Highway 85: “There were celebrations all along the route that day. I remember walking down the on-ramp and seeing the road extend for miles.” | Places
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