TODAY: In 1906, after the San Francisco earthquake destroys the new building for Stanford University Library, many of the city’s leading poets and writers retreat to join the arts colony at Carmel-by-the-Sea.
- “Once I translated the dramatic arc to a wave, I began to think that energy in narrative might also flow in smaller waves…” Jane Alison on Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver. | Lit Hub
- What Oliver Sacks’ obsession with weightlifting can tell us about his writing. | Lit Hub
- “Tragedy gives voice to the complex relations between freedom and necessity that define our being.” Simon Critchley on how we collude in our calamity. | Lit Hub
- “We can’t unhappen it.” Rachel Cline on unearthing a #MeToo story while revising her novel. | Lit Hub
- A reading list of fiction about fact: Michael Cunningham, George Saunders, and other “literary grave robbers.” | Lit Hub
- “In short, they studied the world without abandoning the moral geography of America.” On the cautionary patriotism of the Presidents Adams. | Lit Hub
- Mariah Fredericks on the many parallels between crimes in the Gilded Age and in contemporary America. | CrimeReads
- Ian McEwan’s retro-futurism, Sally Rooney’s intellectual romance, Laila Lalami’s timely immigrant saga, and more of the Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
- Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise: confusing bait-and switch OR a book to make the taut strings in your chest zing? | Book Marks
- In France, five different editions of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame have become bestsellers following the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral. | The Guardian
- Safe deposit boxes containing unpublished writings by Franz Kafka may soon be unlocked following a decade-long legal battle. | San Antonio Express News
- “[Y]ou change the conditions under which violence prevailed.” Rachel Kushner profiles prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore. | The New York Times Magazine
- Marlon James, Tara Westover, and Lynn Nottage are three of the year’s most influential people, along with the creators of Juul. | TIME
- The Modern Library will launch a new trade paperback series dedicated to classics written by women “who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.” | Publishers Weekly
- “There is no better place to look for nuanced critical engagement with Walt Whitman’s complicated legacy than in the work of black intellectuals.” Talking back to Walt Whitman, at 200. | JSTOR
- Aminatta Forna and Sarah Moss are among those shortlisted for this year’s RSL Ondaatje Prize. | The Bookseller
Also on Lit Hub: On Fiction/Non/Fiction, Emily Raboteau and Omar El Akkad discuss telling the stories of climate change • Culture, Too: the conference bringing critics of color together • Rachel Barenbaum and Christopher Castellani in conversation • Read from Pierre Jarawan’s debut novel, The Storyteller
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