TODAY: In 1922, Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature José Saramago is born.
- The winners of the 2017 National Book Awards: Jesmyn Ward, Masha Gessen, and more. | Literary Hub
- Relevant daily reading: 30 dystopian novels by and about women. | Literary Hub
- The origin story of an iconic adaptation: The Graduate. | Literary Hub
- On the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast, talking Russian-American “politics” and our ongoing love of Russian lit. | Literary Hub
- What George Orwell wrote about the dangers of nationalism. | Literary Hub
- The very title of this book indicates the confidence of conscious genius: An 1861 review of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. | Book Marks
- “No babies, no future. No human race. Men find ways to engulf women and to manipulate the female body. We keep thinking about it, because we are always close to the edge.” Margaret Atwood interviews Louise Erdrich. | Elle
- How a translation of Harriet Jacobs’ 19th century memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave-Girl, became a surprise bestseller in Japan. | Forbes
- Jane Hu on Weike Wang’s Chemistry and a new tradition “of Asian-Anglophone writers who both play with and thus begin to undo” the tired literary trope of the impersonal, inscrutable Asian character. | The New Yorker
- Manuel Gonzales, Diane Cook, Rachel Khong, and Maggie Shipstead have written short stories to illuminate these dark days. | BuzzFeed
- “She’s still so powerful in the way that she lays out the connection between happiness and making your own choices.” Joanna Scutts discusses Marjorie Hilis, the author who in 1936 taught thousands of women how to Live Alone and Like It. | Jezebel
- On the poetry of Bertolt Brecht, written “when he harbored an increasing awareness of language’s inability to adequately capture the horrors of fascism and war spreading across Europe.” | The Nation
- Critics have been trying to rescue Emily Dickinson from her Amherst attic for a long time: On a new, “remarkably refreshing” staging of William Luce’s Belle of Amherst. | The Point
