THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1964, Frans Eemil Sillanpää dies.
- What do you do when your book detailing Civil War-era censorship is censored by the US government? | Lit Hub Politics
- “Maybe it’s fair to call this mysticism, but it could also be called democracy. Because it acknowledges the fundamental, unnegotiable, and sacred reality of everyone’s inviolate existence.” Ed Simon considers Allen Ginsberg on his 100th birthday. | Lit Hub Criticism
- When your novel’s a love letter to your hometown, it still “may not come off looking the best in its pages.” | Lit Hub Craft
- Why iconic soap All My Children is more Arthurian than you think. | Lit Hub Criticism
- “I wanted so deeply to be delicate, to curate an image so unimpeachable that it kept me at a remove from danger, but it never worked because all anyone ever wanted was to do was look at my hands.” Justin Wymer reflects on an unsettling family reunion. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Sharon Blackie explores the grounding power of fairy tales. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Timothy Taylor remembers his mother’s journey of place and placelessness from Paris to the Americas. | Lit Hub Memoir
- “My father, one Neil Zabriskie, called Buddy, was the reason I’d met Jonathan in the first place, as my father was dying of metastatic melanoma in the hospital in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where Jonathan worked.” Read from Ann Patchett’s new novel, Whistler. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Playwright Samuel D. Hunter makes the case for tragedy. | The New York Times
- Tyler Jagt writes about the “measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing” to which, he argues, academia is responding with “improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.” | The Chronicle of Higher Education
- Can AI produce writing that we actually want to read? Jay Caspian Kang says no. | The New Yorker
- Fintan O’Toole brings lessons on greatness from Gulliver’s Travels into the present: “The irony of greatness for those who occupied its lower rungs is that, while it did not demand their utter subjection, it did demand their deference.” | NYRB
- Jonathan Weiner meditates on the nature of autobiographical memory. | The American Scholar
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