The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1879, Arthur Conan Doyle’s first published story, “The Mystery of Sasassa Valley,” appears in Chambers’s Journal.
- “The height of American cool is grace and redemption, refined into art. A lightning strike of that transformation happened in the Bronx.” Ian Frazier on the early history of New York City’s northernmost borough. | Lit Hub History
- Jonathan Lethem, Ann Patchett, and more writers share how they manage to put words on a page: “I felt like I was stepping into the novel every day, and when I finished work I stepped out of it.” | Lit Hub Craft
- “It isn’t about writing in a way that only humanizes Black people to white people and non-Black people…it’s also about telling stories where Black people…can be witnessed by each other.” Itoro Bassey on the gift of being understood. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Gary J. Bass examines how the Tokyo Trials created modern Asia, from his Cundill Prize-shortlisted Judgment at Tokyo. | Lit Hub History
- Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain, and Harald Jähner’s Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany are among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
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What’s in an ode? Lory Bedikian on how the poetic form helped her grieve and grow. | Lit Hub Craft
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- Sara Fitzgerald on unrequited love and a recently declassified correspondence between T.S. Eliot and Emily Hale. | Lit Hub Biography
- Cynthia Zarin talks to her daughter, Rose Seccareccia, about their shared family pastimes of art and literature. | Lit Hub In Conversation
- “Things here are going from bad to worse. Last week my aunt Jacinta passed away, and then on Saturday, after we got her buried and the sadness was beginning to settle, it started to rain like never before.” Read from Juan Rulfo’s story collection The Burning Plain, translated by Douglas Weatherford. | Lit Hub Fiction
- The Black List is expanding its focus to include fiction. | Publishers Weekly
- “What if Kafka’s dog were an unlikely hero of theory for untheoretical times? What would it mean to philosophize with Kafka’s dog? To research like a dog?” Philosophy, but make it Kafkaesque. | The Paris Review
- Alexis Pauline Gumbs on why Audre Lorde is so much more than how she is often remembered. | The Nation
- Joanna Kenty considers the pedagogy of campus protest encampments. | Public Books
- “The quest for easily dispensable wisdom has a way of leading the unwary writer astray.” Laura Miller on Matt Haig and the limits of the therapy novel. | Slate
- The Giller Prize has dropped Scotiabank from its name while announcing its longlist (but it hasn’t dropped the sponsorship). | Toronto Star
