TODAY: In 1816, Jane Austen responds to a letter from the Prince Regent suggesting she write a historic romance, saying, “I could not sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life.”
- Why I wrote a novel about sex trafficking: Jane Mendelsohn on the power of fiction to bear witness. | Literary Hub
- Namwali Serpell on Nnedi Okorafor and the new generation of Afrofuturists. | Literary Hub
- Ursula K. Le Guin on racism, anarchy, and hearing her characters speak. | Literary Hub
- Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Imre Kertész has died at 86. | The New York Times
- “I had to pee like a racehorse, or / like a girl who’s had way too much to drink way / too far from home.” A poem from Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things. | BuzzFeed
- Darryl Pinckney talks cultural memory, the black bourgeoisie, and discovering his great uncle’s suppressed memoirs. | Bookforum
- “Our bodies hardly ever tell just one story.” Maia Silber on Lena Dunham, Emily Gould, and female exposure in art and literature. | Berfrois
- The Morning News’s annual Tournament of Books has crowned its champion: Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. | The Morning News
- Ben Lerner on Keith Waldrop, “a quiet major poet, a major poet of quiet.” | The Paris Review
- “Girls—they’re just like us!” Allison Wright analyzes a recent surge in books about unmarried women. | Virginia Quarterly Review
- It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to: Kate Leary rounds up some of literature’s saddest birthday scenes, of which Lesley Gore would certainly have approved. | Ploughshares
Also on Literary Hub: Lucas Mann: confessions of a reluctant memoirist · Celebrating the start of poetry month with 10 new must read collections · A love lost: from Peter Selgin’s memoir, The Inventors
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