- “The United States may be entering an era when we will need to learn from Russia’s struggle with the rhetoric of greatness, while acknowledging our tendency toward the same ideological impasse.” How reading Svetlana Alexievich might enlighten American readers now. | The Los Angeles Review of Books
- Balancing between form’s constraint and creative freedom: Claire Messud on Swing Time. | NYRB
- “I don’t want my role as a writer to be a translator of black grief to white audiences.” A profile of Brit Bennet. | Broadly
- We no longer knew our own country: Dave Eggers on driving through Trump’s America. | The Guardian
- On Achieving Our Country, which was published in 1998 and predicted that “the nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for.” | The New York Times
- On this year’s “resurrection” of poetry, which people are using to “process their thoughts amid the chaos of 2016.” | Wired
- Their full-time job is sadness: Three short stories by Sherman Alexie. | The Rumpus
- “‘White’ is a category that has afforded them an evasion from race, rather than an opportunity to confront it.” Laila Lalami on the identity politics of whiteness. | The New York Times Magazine
- On the Magunga Bookstore, an online store bridging the gap “between those people who sell books and those who write them” in Kenya. | The New Yorker
- “I don’t think any other art can get at how we move back and forth between fear and faith in the way poetry does.” An interview with Jericho Brown. | Divedapper
- “The work of queer American writers has taken on a renewed importance and urgency now—an urgency that existed in the days before LGBT writers had legal protection
s.” On being a queer writer under Trump. | The Atlantic - Announcing the Crisis of Language Project, a “new initiative to restore the possibility of communication in our beleaguered republic” by defining everything from alt-right to post-truth. | The Point
And on Literary Hub:
Zadie Smith on female friendship, conspiracy theories, and musicals · For Thanksgiving, Standing Rock and everything in between, 10 books by indigenous authors · Masha Gesen: peaceful protest is as much a part of democracy as elections · Contemporary novels illuminating the immigrant experience in America · How do we re-imagine their future? Valeria Luiselli on the potential annulment of DACA and civil reaction · A reading list of new feminist classics for sticking it to Mike Pence · Write the book that scares you shitless: an interview with Colson Whitehead · Celeste Ng on giving thanks in a difficult time and the politics inherent in such an act · Falling in love with Neruda all over again while translating his lost poems · Reading the Louis Till file: John Edgar Wideman tries to make sense of American darkness
