TODAY: In 1640, Restoration author Aphra Behn, one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, is baptized.
- “How could we not understand this story of a baby stripped of its name, discovering its own tenacity, talents and unexpected allies as a version of our own stories?” Eric Gansworth on #NativeTwitter’s embrace of Baby Yoda. | Lit Hub TV
- “These are stories about how food shapes people, neighborhoods, and history.” J. Kenji López-Alt on editing food writing during a pandemic. | Lit Hub Food
- This putatively nonfictional consideration of autofiction featuring a Martin Amis cameo may or may not, in fact, be autofiction. | Lit Hub
- “First I look at the poem… Just observing it, as an animated concrete object, trying to understand how it is made.” On riding the metro in Rome, translating poems. | Lit Hub Craft
- The time has come: so begins our countdown of The Biggest Literary Stories of the Year (50 to 31). | Lit Hub
- Willie, Dolly, Enrique, and the country-pop crossover that changed everything. | Lit Hub Music
- “The ladies are up in arms again. They’re demanding equal rights.” Melvin I. Urofsky on the living history of affirmative action in America. | Lit Hub History
- “To date, I’ve cataloged more than 120 Hemingway appearances, references, jokes, adaptations, homages, and doppelgängers from across the globe.” Hemingway lives on… in the imaginations of thousands of comic book artists. | Lit Hub
- The best reviewed mystery and crime fiction of 2020, including Tana French, Don Winslow, Ivy Pochoda, and more. | Lit Hub, Book Marks
- The Haunting of Hill House, Jane Eyre, The Master and Margarita, and more rapid-fire book recs from Carmen Maria Machado. | Book Marks
- The great John le Carré has died at age 89. | New York Times
- Anthony Veasna So, author of the forthcoming debut collection Afterparties, has died at the age of 28. | AP
- Just 11 percent of books published by Big Five publishers in 2018 were written by people of color. Why is publishing (still) so white? | The New York Times
- The editors of the Ferrante Project, a collective that “brought together sixteen works by women writers of color experimenting with freedom, anti-fame, and anonymity,” on publishing, play, and radical trust. | BOMB
- Meet six writers expanding the realm of erotica with an emphasis on queer experience. | Autostraddle
- Leslie Brody on the politics of Louise Fitzhugh, who “wanted her readers to be confronted and shocked by the undiluted fact that children were murdered by the police because they were Black in America.” | The Paris Review