February 19 – 23, 2024 ‹ Literary Hub

TODAY: Poet, writer, playwright, musician, painter, and filmmaker Weldon Kees was born in 1914.

“It should be a modest request to ask that ‘left’ not mean supporters of authoritarian regimes.” Rebecca Solnit on the perennial divisions of the American left. | Lit Hub Politics
“Malcolm believed that Muhammad’s teachings saved him from rotting away in prison; saved him from assimilationist ideas of wanting to be White; saved him from ignorance of Black history and humanity.” Ibram X Kendi on George Breitman and the enduring legacy of Malcolm X. | Lit Hub History
“The intimacy I feel with what my home once was cannot be reconciled with what downtown has become.” Emma Dries reflects on her childhood home and how 9/11 changed downtown Manhattan forever. | Lit Hub Memoir
Matthew Salesses on the “too-lateness” of climate change and the future of climate fiction. | Lit Hub Craft
Neil McRobert recommends twelve books for fans of True Detective: Night Country. | Vulture
Three visual poems on memory and sleep by Dario Roberto Dioli. | 3:AM Magazine
“Personally, I always let the pool boy say his lines to the bored housewife because I enjoy this artifice in the same way I do the lead-up to a real kiss: no matter what’s said, I know what’s going to happen.” Three writers on porn. | The Paris Review
Alex Brown highlights the latest in short speculative fiction. | Reactor
Jake Zawlacki interviews Dave McKean about “comics, dreams, AI, creativity, puppets, intention, semiotics, aesthetics, and no less than the meaning of life.” | The Comics Journal
An interview with Kelly Link: “Stripped down, psychologically astute realistic fiction is all well and good, but I wanted to write ghost stories and science fiction and fairytales.” | The Guardian
What do Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, and A. A. Milne have in common? They all got tired of writing the characters they were most known for. | The Atlantic
Ron DeSantis claims that he didn’t actually enable book bans as he begins to backtrack on his own policies. | The New Republic
“Moser’s book reads almost like a ghost story of the repressed history of coastal California, its lost ecologies of abundance, the development of its racially segregated industrial garden, and the eclipse and appropriation of forms of proletarian bohemianism.” On surfing and infrastructures. | Public Books
“My overflowing shelves reflect my literary tastes: chaotic, promiscuous and shallow.” An interview with Ed Zwick. | The New York Times
What’s going on with the Hugo Awards? Zoe Guy explains. | Vulture
“Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry, their writing processes, page versus spoken-word, American vs British poetics.” Oluwaseun Olayiwola on generation gaps and aging. | Granta
“Jordan resisted the pull of American exceptionalism; she felt that the fate of Black people in the States was linked eternally to the fate of Palestinians…” On June Jordan’s poem “Moving Toward Home.” | Lux Magazine
An interview with Paul Yamazaki, chief buyer at City Lights Bookstore. | The Paris Review
Lilly Dancyger talks to Leslie Jamison about her “deeply, entirely personal” memoir, Splinters. | The Millions
Writer, political scientist, and civil rights leader Charles V. Hamilton has died. | The New York Times
“Looking at the world, one might well believe that too few people have read the scenes that would soften their hearts.” Claudia Roth Pierpont on books in wartime. | The New Yorker
Casey Plett considers the strange appeal of bad news. | The Walrus
Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz in conversation about anarchism and Ursula K. Le Guin. | Public Books
An unpublished poem by Delmore Schwartz. | The Paris Review
“In other words, when we look at history’s major censorious regimes, all of them—I want to stress that; all of them—invested enormous resources in programs designed to encourage self-censorship, more resources than they invested in using state action to actively destroy or censor information.” In light of the Hugo Awards controversy, Ada Palmer considers censorship. | Reactor
An interview with Elizabeth Fiend, also known as Luna Ticks: “To me, comics were the only anti-bourgeois art form that replicated the DIY philosophy of punk. They were not typically showcased in galleries at that time. So the comics medium was the only one for me.” | The Comics Journal
Nina Strochlic looks inside an early 20th century “scam manual,” written to help German immigrants avoid being conned. | Atlas Obscura
“Here was a woman who’d found the elusive balance, or dismissed the idea entirely.” Hillary Kelly on Diana Athill. | The New Yorker
On Victor I. Cazares, the playwright on an HIV medication strike over the New York Theatre Workshop’s failure to call for a cease-fire in Gaza. | Vulture
“The tension in Kafka between appetite and its fulfillment is a crucial aspect of the writer’s work.” Cooking and Kafka. | The Paris Review
On Amelia Rosselli’s Sleep: “Rosselli’s strange English…reveals the Anglo-English canon as heterogeneous, as made up of geographic and linguistic crossings and histories of colonialism and imperialism.” | The Los Angeles Review of Books
Simon Parkin tells the story of the bartender and part-time go-go dancer who rescued a masterpiece of working-class literature from obscurity. | The New Yorker
Alissa Quart considers what is needed to save the U.S. media industry. | Jacobin
R.O. Kwon writes about culture, shame, and why she hopes her parents won’t read her book. | The Guardian