TODAY: In 1906, Frank Wedekind’s play Spring Awakening: A Children’s Tragedy premieres at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin under the direction of Max Reinhardt.
- “The policing of language has to do with fears of foreigners and vagrants, with suspicions about languages of the underground.” On the suppression of Rotwelsch, the lost language of Central Europe. | Lit Hub History
- “Prose poetry understands prose’s conventions and its constituent parts… while also being conspicuously a form of poetry.” Can you spot the difference? This might help. | Lit Hub
- “Art, at its highest, is an exercise in perception.” Bill T. Jones on the uneasy liaison between storyteller and listener. | Lit Hub
- “Ray, who often postponed questions of decisive completeness, rarely rounded off an experience.” On the friendship between artist Ray Johnson and poet William S. Wilson. | Lit Hub
- Someone has to make it to the credits: Alyssa Pelish on “The Final Girl, the lone female character in a slasher movie who manages to survive.” | Lit Hub Film
- “I think in revision there comes a point where you go, Am I going to be able to get away with this?” Doon Arbus talks to Francine Prose about the question that eventually confronts all writers. | Lit Hub
- “She was far more than the doomed artist.” David Rieff on Susan Taubes. | Lit Hub
- Barack Obama’s memoir, Robert Harris’s latest WWII novel, and an oral history of Dazed and Confused all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
- Malcolm Beith on the long fall from grace of Genaro Garcia Luna, Mexico’s former security chief, now awaiting trial in New York. | CrimeReads
- “Home-school for Nick was one of the pandemic’s silver linings, allowing me to understand him better than I ever had before. But like many of our hastily constructed pandemic routines, it wasn’t going to continue once we had other options.” Nell Freudenberger on adding the teacher’s life to the writer’s life. | Romper
- “I think we actually sabotage our own happiness with this unrestrained anger.” Read a profile of Loretta J. Ross, whose Smith College course on White Supremacy in the Age of Trump teaches students to call people in instead of calling them out. | The New York Times
- Read beyond Hillbilly Elegy with these stories of the American working class. | Los Angeles Times
- “Poetry asks the questions we need to be asking. It starts the conversations we’re often afraid to have.” Jae Nichelle on her poetry practice. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Seattle’s indie booksellers recommend titles “to provoke and inspire and comfort” over the holiday season. | Seattle Times