TODAY: In 1958, Brendan Behan‘s autobiographical Borstal Boy is banned in Ireland by the Censorship of Publications Board
  • “Believe the autocrat. He means what he says.” Masha Gessen provides 6 rules for survival under autocracy. | NYRB
  • “The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.” David Remnick on the election. | The New Yorker
  • “I have watched every Presidential election on television since I was a child, but I have never felt the degree of terror my loved ones and I feel now.” On watching the election undocumented. | n+1
  • “They’ve seen anger in the world, and it makes sense to them, and now it seems right to see it on the page.” Rereading James Baldwin in the Obama years. | Guernica
  • reading list to help understand “the political, economic, regional and social shifts that drove one of the most stunning political upsets in the nation’s history.” | The New York Times
  • PEN has released a report entitled Writing on the Wall, “the most comprehensive account to date of the disappearance of five Hong Kong booksellers in late 2015.” | PEN America
  • “But listen, love, because I need to remind you of something and I need you to remember it extra well over the next four years: This is our street.” Mira JacobNicole Chung, and Manuel Gonzales on parenting under President Trump. | BuzzFeed Reader
  • “One moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.” A short story by Mohsin Hamid. | The New Yorker
  • “The republic is built on a destruction of language. A kind of obliteration of language that will enable and excuse violence against bodies. My job is to interrogate and agitate that as often as I can.” A profile of Solmaz Sharif. | Newsweek
  • Historical amnesia and civil resistance: On This is an Uprising and how political change actually occurs. | The New Inquiry
  • Bushwick is its own character, and this book is one of its biographies: An interview with Jacqueline Woodson. | Poets & Writers
  • Mary Beard on citizenship and self-implosion in ancient Rome (and not on the American election). | Los Angeles Review of Books
  • A story for each of our presidents from Amelia Gray, Rion Amilcar Scott, and 42 other writers. | Melville House Books
  • “I’m not a big believer in the romantic idea that art can heal. What it does do is bring things to the surface, and then I go see my psychiatrist.” An interview with Rabih Alameddine. | Electric Literature
  • “Reporters’ eagerness first to ridicule Trump and his supporters, then dismiss them, and finally to actively lobby and argue for their defeat have led us to a moment when the entire journalistic enterprise needs to be rethought and rebuilt.” On the failure of reporting in this year’s election. | Columbia Journalism Review

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