TODAY: In 1851, Marian Evans, the future George Eliot, takes up her appointment as assistant editor of the Westminster Review, (where she will later meet G. H. Lewes).
- We have always dreamed of other worlds: Gabrielle Bellot offers a literary a history of imagined planets. | Literary Hub
- Read 10 of the best short stories Playboy ever published. | Literary Hub
- From Talese to Didion, what’s next for the literary documentary? | Literary Hub
- Veronica Henry couldn’t read through her grief, until she found these books. | Literary Hub
- On love, loss, and reading Anne Carson at the center of the earth. | Literary Hub
- Seeing the world through my character’s eyes. | Literary Hub
- A letter from Carson: 50 years after her death, read Carson McCullers on suicide, psychiatry, and the mind of the artist. | Literary Hub
- “I have no choice but to try and be a bridge between my white family and all the people like me who are terrified to be living and raising children in Trump’s America.” Nicole Chung on engaging with racism, both within her family and in broader America. | Longreads
- Dystopic soothsaying and interior murk: On the prescient fiction of J.G. Ballard. | Guernica
- How a group of “bookworms, retired librarians, grassroots organizers, [and] historic preservationists” saved the Mid-Manhattan Library. | The Nation
- “Stories of the erotic adventures of wayward spouses don’t hold the same appeal as they did in the 1960s.” On Richard Stern’s Other Men’s Daughters and divorce in the American novel. | Bookforum
- “The concern did not lie with the murder, but instead with the murderess, a construct treated similarly to that of a deconstructed maiden or princess.” On Shirley Jackson and our collective obsession with female killers. | Electric Literature
- Why Kanye West is the “true heir to the 16th century metaphysical poet John Donne.” | New Statesman
- For fans of century-old literary gossip: It has been discovered that Marcel Proust paid for glowing reviews of the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past. | The Guardian
- Dunkirk, drug addiction, and more: the best-reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
