TODAY: In 1938, Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is born.
• “Bookselling is a polar, problematic lover, an insistent poly-amant.” What booksellers can teach us about reading, writing, and publishing. | Lit Hub
• What happens when a fire destroys all your paintings? You become a writer, of course. | Lit Hub
• Mike McCormack’s This Plague of Souls, Vanessa Chan’s The Storm We Made, and Erika Howsare’s The Age of Deer all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
• Erika Howsare on finding inspiration from the day’s headlines. | Lit Hub Craft
• “If a painter put wings on an image of a naked girl, then she was no longer human, and so exempt from the rules of propriety…” On the serious business of 19th-century fairy paintings. | Lit Hub Art
• Cassidy Hutchinson talks to Roxanne Coady about her front row seat on the build up to the January 6th Insurrection. | Lit Hub Radio
• “What are all these open couples, throuples, and polycules suddenly doing in the culture, besides one another?” Jennifer Wilson considers the cultural mainstreaming of polyamory. | The New Yorker
• A judge has ruled that the man charged with stabbing Salman Rushdie is entitled to see a manuscript of the author’s memoir as part of trial preparation. | The Guardian
• “Spokesman for a generation, perhaps, but one that had fallen out of fashion.” Adam Langer considers Philip Roth as persona. | The Atlantic
• Joshua Barone explores the unlikely friendship between Willa Cather and Yehudi Menuhin. | The New York Times