TODAY: In 1983, Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams III dies.
- Literary awards season is upon us: the Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalists have been announced, as well as several of the 2017 PEN America Literary Award winners. | Los Angeles Times, PEN America
- There’s no need to be rude: Rachel Cusk on truth, politeness, and what unkind language reveals about society. | The New York Times
- “There are other ways of telling stories, and other ways of staging history, that other playwrights did better.” Against the perception that Shakespeare was a singular genius. | The New Yorker
- 34 works by women of color to read in 2017, including Valeria Luiselli, Edwidge Danticat, and Jenny Zhang. | Electric Literature
- The world will be Tlön: On the parallels between Trump’s list of “underreported” terrorist attacks and Borges’ imagined construction of a false, alternate reality. | n+1
- A lost Walt Whitman novel—a “quasi-Dickensian tale of an orphan’s adventures”—has been rediscovered after 165 years. | The New York Times
- A reading list of books, articles, criticism, and poetry that “demand a critical assessment of American culture” and demonstrate how we arrived where we are now. | Jezebel
- Make America read again: How librarians are continuing the tradition of “using their professional skills to support civilian resistance.” | Broadly
- Molly McArdle profiles Roxane Gay, who “does the work that helps remake the literary world into something better.” | Brooklyn Magazine
- Ibram X. Kendi has “selected the most influential books on race and the black experience published in the United States for each decade of the nation’s existence,” from Thomas Jefferson to Michelle Alexander. | The New York Times
- “In modern Korea, fiction continues to be a critical mode of bearing witness.” On Han Kang’s examination of the Gwangju massacre, Human Acts. | The Nation
- “That’s what was fun about writing this book: I was having these moments of absolute, bottom-of-the-well depression, but also power and agency and fierceness and control.” An interview with Morgan Parker. | The Cut
- On April 4th, 90 movie theaters across the U.S. will screen Michael Radford’s adaptation of 1984 in protest of Donald Trump. | Rolling Stone
- On the slowly vanishing, gender-specific language Nüshu, which allowed women to “keep autobiographies, write poetry and stories, and communicate with ‘sworn sisters.’” | Atlas Obscura
- On the importance of teaching historical fiction in a “political moment that summons the label ‘unprecedented’ at about the same rate as the number of historical analogies stirred up by the Trump election.” | The Atlantic
Also on Lit Hub:
Teddy Roosevelt vs. Mark Twain: A brief history of American intervensionism · If they gave Oscars to books: Our 2016 nominees · How the many film adaptations of the “unfilmable” Wuthering Heights change our understanding of the original text · Edward McPherson contemplates human extinction deep in the Badlands · Aleksandar Hemon, Valeria Luiselli, and others reflect on the new administration, one month after inauguration · How Mary Miller’s stories demystify the white working class · From imbibing spirits to spiritualist mediums, life in the Connecticut suburbs · M*lo might be done, but his transphobia lingers: On the normalization of hate · When writing a biography becomes a race against death: On the morbidity inherent to documenting a life · Getting lost before the internet: Cara Hoffman on the fine art of disappearing into Athens
