TODAY: In 1926, poet Ingeborg Bachmann is born. 
  • “The objective for me is to find a language that tells the reader something hard to define about the texture of each character’s consciousness.” An interview with Adam Haslett. | The Guardian
  • Once there were femme fatales, and now there are girls: Why women are writing today’s best crime fiction. | The Atlantic
  • In which a dad who had abandoned fiction twenty-five years prior falls in love with Jane Eyre. | The Hairpin
  • “My sadness was so great that I only could have loved Either/Or more if it had literally been covered with dirt.” Emma Straub reflects on her college devotion to Elliott Smith. | The Paris Review
  • Body snatchers and Byronic heroes: On the literary tradition of objectifying women’s corpses. | Hazlitt
  • “While many book lovers may be tempted to gloat, the death of Barnes & Noble would be catastrophic—not just for publishing houses and the writers they publish, but for American culture as a whole.” Why we still need Barnes & Noble. | The New Republic
  • “The understanding of gender that Gender Trouble suggests is not only recognizable; it is pop.” A profile of Judith Butler, featuring an infographic of cats explaining gender performativity. | The Cut
  • “A war doesn’t end simply because we say it does, and a war isn’t simply the things that happen on the battlefield… To me, war is a much more expansive beast.” Speaking with Viet Thanh Nguyen. | The New York Times
  • Voltaire the scammer: How the French philosopher made a fortune by outsmarting one of the earliest lotteries. | Lapham’s Quarterly
  • “When people can’t fight you, they say, ‘Why are you so pessimistic?’ It’s a different question than ‘Are you correct?’” An interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates. | Playboy
  • Bravery is easier for the dying: A short story by C.E. Morgan. | Oxford American
  • “I realized there were loads of novels that were good that weren’t in English, and I realized there was something I could do.” Speaking with Don Bartlett, Knausgaard’s English translator. | Los Angeles Review of Books
  • The James Baldwin House Association has launched in order to “protect, acquire and renovate Baldwin’s home in Provence and eventually to create a residency for artists and writers as well as a center for progressive thought and culture.” | James Baldwin Foundation
  • Behold the origins of Angel Catbird, the superhero from Margaret Atwood’s graphic novel. | BuzzFeed Books
  • Must the novel as a form always stand in the shadow of the institution of marriage? On female bachelor narratives, from Elizabeth Hardwick to Sheila Heti. | The Point

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