TODAY: In 1957, 520 copies of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, printed in England and imported, are seized by United States Customs on the grounds of obscenity.  

• Jamie Hood defends the earnest, the sentimental, and those who still need to put their trauma into words in a post-#MeToo era. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Roxane Gay on the importance of expanding and complicating our understanding of contemporary feminist thought. | Lit Hub Politics
• Peter Trachtenberg examines how icon Lorraine O’Grady’s literary artwork fused poetry and politics. | Lit Hub Art
• Titles by Jamie Hood, Sophie Kemp, Bob the Drag Queen, and more feature among the 24 new books out today! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Binnie Kirshenbaum mediates on navigating the boundary between fact and fiction: “To write fiction takes patience and fortitude to fend off the assumptions that our novels are memoirs.” | Lit Hub Craft
• Terry McDonell talks to Graydon Carter about the golden age of print magazines. | Lit Hub In Conversation
• “If I didn’t feel an absence or a sense of loss, there would be no need to write.” Sanam Mahloudji on how loss can help fuel a creative life. | Lit Hub Memoir
• “As Elphie begins to command the world about her (even if that world doesn’t obey, now or ever), the private lives of her family grow more obscure to her.” Read from Gregory Maguire’s new novel, Elphie. | Lit Hub Fiction
• “Call it aching, call it wrenching, call it shattering, but they are all wrong words, useless in their familiarity.” Yiyun Li meditates on fiction, death, and grief. | The New Yorker
• George Saunders considers the work of Inka Essenhigh, and “the virtuous slowing-down of visual perception.” | The Paris Review
• Joseph A. Howley on teaching King Lear at Columbia in the wake of Mahmoud Khalil’s kidnapping. | The Nation
• “The accusation that gender or gender theorists are a threat to women forgets that the issue of ‘gender’ has been central to feminist thought at least as far back as the work of Simone de Beauvoir in the late 1940s.” Judith Butler on Executive Order 14168. | London Review of Books
• On Brazilian Neoconcrete poet Hélio Oiticica’s “radical and compelling rethinking of mid-century Modernism.” | Asymptote 
• Hank Kennedy examines three books that defined mid-20th century comics censorship. | The Comics Journal

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