TODAY: In 1978, Leigh Brackett, one of the most prominent women writers of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, dies.  

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• Mia Fowler on traveling to Ghana, making sense of herself, and reading Maryse Condé’s Segu. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Emily Usher on the unrealistic idealism first-love stories and why more literature should depict crushes in their messy, authentic glory. | Lit Hub Craft
• What the paradoxical mating habits of the Black Grouse can reveal about the long history of evolution. | Lit Hub Science
• Edna Bonhomme documents the battles waged across Europe and the United States during the time of Spanish Influenza. | Lit Hub History
• On the joys of sharing the kitchen with children (also, a recipe!). | Lit Hub Food
• “The woman invited the man over for dinner and a movie and while they did eat dinner, she’d made a roast chicken with potatoes and string beans, they skipped the movie and instead started talking about their lives…” Read from Robert Lopez’s novel-in-stories, The Best People. | Lit Hub Fiction
• The inner workings of DOGE’s attacks on public libraries. | The New Republic
• “If the slender board had been 2,000 years old, the find might have been a Rosetta Stone, celebrated as the key to unlocking the stories of long-disappeared cultures.” On the beauty of documenting school library graffiti. | JSTOR Daily
• Toye Oladinni considers Ọlábísí Àjàlá’s travel memoir, An African Abroad. | The Paris Review
• Inside Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar’s best friends book tour. | Vanity Fair
• “I detect embers, even flames, of actual hope emanating from Gago’s writings, despite their theoretical density and the moral weight of her topics.” Amy Reed-Sandoval considers Verónica Gago’s feminist anti-fascism. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Why is everyone reading Lonesome Dove all of a sudden? Michael Sebastian investigates. | Esquire

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