TODAY: In 1963, The Bell Jar is published under Sylvia Plath’s pseudonym, “Victoria Lucas.”
- “If likability equals profitability, I’m probably headed in the wrong direction.” Emily Gould on the compulsory niceness of women in publishing. | BuzzFeed Reader
- Why are so many stories about girlhood really stories about pain? On female sadness, Leslie Jamison, and Emma Cline’s The Girls. | The Baffler
- “He knits together the vocabularies of science and art, memory and prediction, literature and math, physics and emotion.” How Ted Chiang became one of the most influential science fiction writers of his generation. | The New Yorker
- “Do you really think a musical about an alien, a dead Bob Dylan, and the work of Emma Lazarus is an idea someone is likely to steal?” Michael Cunningham on collaborating with David Bowie. | GQ
- “I do believe that while a picture may paint a thousand words, a thousand considered words are more powerful than a thousand misleading pictures.” Eimear McBride on representations of women’s sexuality in our culture and literature. | Times Literary Supplement
- The dystopian narratives of the Trump regime will come along soon enough: On the literary trends of the Obama years (autofiction, fables of meritocracy, novels set in the recent past, and the trauma narratives.) | Vulture
- Alain de Botton, Olivia Laing, and other experts in their fields on the 5 books that most inspired them. | The Guardian
- Keep your damn Hobbit: Marlon James has released information about his epic fantasy series, the Dark Star Trilogy. | Entertainment Weekly
- “Trump is patriarchy unbuttoned, paunchy, in a baggy suit, with his hair oozing and his lips flapping and his face squinching into clownish expressions of mockery and rage and self-congratulation.” Rebecca Solnit on our President-elect. | London Review of Books
- Announcing the shortlist for and the judges of the 2017 Tournament of Books. | The Morning News
- “It’s pleasurable to read and write about confusion because that’s what we do as people. We are often confused.” An interview with Lynne Tillman. | The Creative Independent
- Come for mom’s mental health memoir, stay for the careful and convincing polemic against the War on Drugs: Claire Vaye Watkins on microdosing and Ayelet Waldman’s A Really Good Day. | New Republic
- On the “perils publishers face as they tailor their publishing plans to reflect volatile new political realities” and the future of conservative imprints under Trump. | The New York Times
- On The Art of the Affair and uncovering the relationships between the (apparently, much more fun) artists of the past. | VICE
- Librarians on the strangest things they’ve discovered in books (a whole taco, multiple accounts of raw bacon, laminated marijuana leaves, etc.) | Tin House
And on Literary Hub:
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A brief survey of the great American novel(s), from Moby-Dick to The Flamethrowers · 20 short novels to stay up all night reading · Writers resist: An anti-inauguration on MLK’s birthday · Eva Hoffman on how art can defeat boredom and loneliness · In honor of Agatha Christie, 30 essential crime reads written by women · W.S. Merwin on reading what you want, reading it slowly, and the beauty of trees · Min Jin Lee on selling her first novel after 11 years · Economist James Kwak on free-market mythmaking and the failure of democratic storytelling · When writing becomes another lifestyle good: On MFA programs and affordability · 30 indie press books we’re looking forward to this year
