The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1896, Joan Lindsay, the Australian author of Picnic at Hanging Rock, is born.
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“Why does the empathy we cultivate through literature often remain a performative gesture, confined to the realm of fiction and failing to take root in the real world?” Etaf Rum on reading and writing during crisis. | Lit Hub
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On the urgent wartime writings of Polish-American Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. | Lit Hub History
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“Einstein, stop telling God what to do.” Three moments in the life of a pretty famous scientist. | Lit Hub Biography
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One hundred years after the birth of Swedish literary prodigy Stig Dagerman, Diego Courchay goes in search of his typewriter. | Lit Hub
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Beth Kephart considers the eternal hope of rare books: “They keep what we can’t keep. They counterweight the dying.” | Lit Hub
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“When Michael Cunningham writes like himself, and not like an apostle, he is one of love’s greatest witnesses.” 5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
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From Sinan Antoon, poetry that gives voice to “a Palestinian child’s experience of Israeli bombardments, displacement, and a longing to return home.” | Words Without Borders
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“Never has a writer of such enviable talents displayed such undiminishing patience for his reader, such evident and unpretentious pleasure in the pedagogical function of good prose.” Sam Adler-Bell on George Schialabba. | Commonweal
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Adrienne Westenfeld talks to LeVar Burton about fighting for the right to read in an era of book bans. | Esquire
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In praise of Emily of New Moon, the oft-forgotten L.M. Montgomery novel that deserves a second look. | New York Times
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In the first installment of “Higher Gossip,” a column on sex and love, Lillian Fishman advises a reader to take advantage of “a rare opportunity to be surprised.” | The Point
Also on Lit Hub: Nina LaCour on finding a story in her own backyard • On the magic of magnetic force • Read from Mónica Ojeda’s newly translated novel, Nefando (tr. Sarah Booker)
