TODAY: In 1929, Milan Kundera is born.
- On the stray dogs of Mexico City: Chloe Aridjis offers a history and a hymn. | Lit Hub
- “It’s always satisfying to cast aspersions on one’s enemy’s parentage.” Katherine Dunn sure knows how to cuss. | Lit Hub
- “What would happen if those of us who are tired of the motherhood guilt-and-shame game declined to play?” Polly Rosenwaike on motherhood, a job like any other. | Lit Hub
- “It felt like I was missing something. It felt like we were missing something.” Damon Young on growing up with PTBD: Post-Traumatic Brokeness Disorder. | Lit Hub
- An afternoon at María Gainza’s Buenos Aires home: Nathan Scott McNamara talks to the writer about art, criticism, and autofiction. | Lit Hub
- Douglas Brinkley considers totalitarianism, climate change and more with five books to help us understand the present moment. | Lit Hub
- “You can hear it begin.” On the protean etymology of spring, season of marvels. | Lit Hub
- “Poetry seems to understand the nature of death, seems to come closest to it—but no one can fathom how.” Read in interview with Brenda Shaughnessy. | Lit Hub
- “There are only those who follow the law, and those who break it.” Stephanie Jo Harris on Victor Hugo’s creation of the archetypal cop: Inspector Javert. | CrimeReads
- Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt…except the bad reviews: what the critics first wrote about Slaughterhouse-Five. | Book Marks
- Shelf Love: literature in translation recs from Riffraff, Providence’s vibrant new indie bookstore. | Book Marks
- Jennifer Baker recommends black women novelists you should be reading, from Nalo Hopkinson to Selena Montgomery (aka Stacey Abrams). | Electric Literature
- “We pursue in reality the things that we’re capable of imagining, and those of us who are in industries of imagination have a responsibility to depict futures that are for everyone.” Read an interview with N. K. Jemisin. | Writer’s Digest
- The book industry isn’t actually dying—that’s just an excuse to keep salaries low. | The Guardian
- The Marshall Project has launched News Inside, a print publication featuring stories relating directly to life as an incarcerated person that will be distributed in prisons and jails across the country. | The Marshall Project
- “I grieve for what has been so carelessly and thoughtless thrown away.” Irish writers respond to Brexit. | The Irish Times
- “The corporate embodiment of the English teacher trying anything possible to show kids how relatable classic lit still is”: A kind of complimentary, somewhat backhanded take on the meme-friendly SparkNotes Twitter account. | The A.V. Club
- In celebration of the Czech-born French author Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, who turns 90 today. | Radio Prague
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