TODAY: In 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre explains his refusal of the Nobel Prize in Le Figaro, writing he always refused official distinctions and did not want to be “institutionalized.” 
  • Margaret Atwood on fan fiction, retelling Shakespeare, and her own artistic legacy (“Not dead yet.”). | Hazlitt
  • “I have no tolerance for people who are not thinking deeply about things… And I have no tolerance for people just not being a part of the world and being in it and not trying to change it.” An interview with Jacqueline Woodson. | NPR
  • “Poetry offers me a way to rewire and channel the sense of cultural loss that I feel into a new kind of culture, without losing myself or having my identity subsumed into a monolithic ‘Indian’ identity.” An interview with Tommy Pico. | The Rumpus
  • T Magazine pays tribute to the Greats: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Gloria Steinem, and others write thank-you notes to Michelle Obama, and Jeffrey Eugenides profiles Zadie Smith. | T Magazine
  • Would you like to do a good deed? Garnette Cadogan on walking in, and moving to, New York City. | BuzzFeed
  • On the origins (a bathroom in Fredrikstad, Norway in 1969, on LSD) and implications (things are bad, but they can always get worse) of Hariton Pushwagner’s art. | The Paris Review
  • Anita Rojas on what translation means to her: “Establishing an intense relationship which unfolds entirely within the written word.” | Asymptote Journal
  • “Realism is a genre–a very rich one, that gave us and continues to give us lots of great fiction… But by making that one genre the standard of quality, by limiting literature to it, we were leaving too much serious writing out of serious consideration.” Ursula K. Le Guin on writing various types of fiction. | The Guardian
  • Although nothing seems arbitrary, the books are surprise after surprise: Deborah Eisenberg on the fiction of Henry Green. | NYRB
  • Delving into the Three Marinas (“the warrior one,” “the spiritual one,” and “the bullshit one”) in Marina Abramović’s new memoir. | The New Republic
  • All the subtlety of a Donald Trump rally: Adapting Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, a “frightening book for frightening times,” for the stage today. | The New Yorker
  • “How I learned the rules so I could break them, but I found breaking them a very hard thing.” Larissa Pham on the taste of rightness and writing her first novel. | Catapult
  • On Carmilla, the original vampire novel of modern Europe, which features nightmares of giant cats and strong lesbian undertones. | Atlas Obscura
  • “I always want my books to be a kind of couch. You read a few pages in the late afternoon, fall asleep, and have a memorable dream.” An interview with Eliot Weinberger. | Tin House
  • Capital D her: How Charles Dickens “politely wiggle[d] his way out of that very tight corset of Victorian censorship.” | The Millions

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