TODAY: In 1925, Flannery O’Connor is born.
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“Solidarity can never be pristine.” Arundhati Roy on free speech, failing democracy, and an India approaching gridlock. | Lit Hub Politics
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Alissa Quart on the myths of Little House on the Prairie: “I couldn’t help but recognize that though they were seemingly harmless, these novels and that hit show were a crucial example of the way the bootstrapping ideology wormed its way into the minds of children.” | Lit Hub Criticism
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What happens to your brain when you look at art? | Lit Hub Science
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Just an innocent little list that will make no one mad: The Lit Hub staff argues for 13 adaptations better than the books they’re based on. | Lit Hub Film & TV
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Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X, Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America, and Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
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CrimeReads looks back at the 50th anniversary of a groundbreaking time in crime cinema: 1973. | CrimeReads
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“Very few people actually want their money to disappear every month.” In which Sally Rooney quietly eviscerates the landlord class. | Irish Times
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“Close reading may be easy to measure, but it’s not the way to get kids to fall in love with storytelling.” Katherine Marsh examines why a generation of readers resents reading. | The Atlantic
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How did mainstream and liberal press outlets become so enamored by J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy that they made him a senator? | If Books Could Kill
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Rapid-fire book recs from Emily St. John Mandel. | ELLE
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“Once you monetize your own authenticity, how do you keep it authentic?” So how do BookTok’ers make money? | Vox
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Russian novelist Mikhail Shishkin has some ideas on “how to de-Putinize Russia.” | The Telegraph
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“Good porn is no longer than twenty minutes long.” Polly Barton shares three “porn chats” she had with friends and acquaintances, after a lifetime of never talking about porn. | The Paris Review
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Hua Hsu on how J. Crew made prep an aspirational identity. | The New Yorker
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“Still Pictures makes explicit a muted moral provocation running through Malcolm’s books: that we are all essentially false Pharisees, serial violators of the Golden Rule.” Sam Adler-Bell on Janet Malcolm’s turn to memoir. | The New Republic
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Garth Greenwell in praise of filth: “The problem is that, in much of our discussion of art, we’ve made a mistake about what moral engagement is, and so what art’s role in it might be.” | The Yale Review
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Some Proud Boys tried to crash New York attorney general Letitia James’s Drag Queen Story Hour, and it did not go well for them. | The Advocate
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Donna Cameron on trying to learn about sex through… Steinbeck, and other essays about libido from the new issue of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. | Dorothy Parker’s Ashes
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The Marshall Project shares five things they’ve learned about prison book ban policies across the country. | The Marshall Project
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“Kinda embarrassing to admit, but not one person came to my Atlanta tour event.” YA writer Jamar J. Perry experiences one of the less pleasant writerly rites of passage. | Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Also on Lit Hub:
Min Jin Lee on the relationship between language and power • Catherine Lacey on playing the long game • Why every writer should learn how to translate • A brief accounting of the unacknowledged philosophical genius of women • Zoe Fishman on reclaiming widowhood narratives • “The things my daughters come up with are so much richer and more surreal than the three-act conservative fantasies Disney conjures for them.” • The ethics of writing about race as a white woman • Mona Simpson on the role of research in novel writing • Christiane Blot-Labarrère considers Marguerite Duras’s No More • Writing about the early postpartum days of motherhood while living them • Pooja Lakshmin on the dangers of the self-care industrial complex • Searching for Black nature writing • Your pedicure pumice stone was once a foaming mass of gas and lava • The catch-22 of writing poetry about depression • Reading Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” through the lens of dementia and caregiving • Investigating the nefarious rise (and linguistics) of conspiracy theorists • Celebrating the renaissance of the world’s most venomous animal: the jellyfish.