TODAY: In 1955, the American Civil Liberties Union announces it will defend Allen Ginsberg’s book Howl against obscenity charges.
- Leslie Jamison talks to Jamie Quatro about faith, intoxication, and parenthood. | Lit Hub
- So… what is consciousness, anyway? Michael S. Gazzaniga goes deep on the neural networks that make us, us. | Lit Hub
- Lorrie Moore: It’s better to write than to be a writer. | Lit Hub
- From the invasion of Ukraine to the 2016 elections, America is losing the information war to Russia (badly). | Lit Hub
- From Vladimir Nabokov to Rivka Galchen, 10 of the strangest crimes in fiction. | CrimeReads
- “This essay is so famous it is said to have spawned its own mini genre of essays about leaving New York.” Michelle Dean on how Joan Didion became Joan Didion. | BuzzFeed Reader
- Where can we go if King is not only what we should aspire to be, but King is all that we are allowed to become?” Mychal Denzel Smith on the trouble with our collective memory of Martin Luther King. | The Atlantic
- “You must discover, not invent, who your character is.” Lesley Nneka Arimah on creating characters in fiction. | Signature Reads
- On Norah Lange, Beatriz Sarlo, and other Argentinian writers who lead “English-language readers weaned on a steady diet of Borges, Bioy Casares, and porteño legend to do some searching of their own.” | Words Without Borders
- Hoping to catch James Comey on his A Higher Loyalty book tour? You’d better have deep pockets, as tickets are being resold for as much as $850 online. | Los Angeles Times
- The best short stories break at least one rule. | Lit Hub
- “One, I realized literally NO ONE cares if I give up on a book except me. Two, I realized that I’m going to die.” Why it’s okay (really!) to stop reading mediocre books. | Electric Lit
- “They’d heard that she’d written a paper on the psychology of dying. She hadn’t, but she took their mistake as a sign.” How Elisabeth Kübler-Ross became our preeminent grief guru. | New York Review of Books
Also on Literary Hub: The writer’s responsibility: How do we tell the stories of those who cannot? · The life that almost was. . . On the bookstore in Paris we didn’t buy · A short story by Dino Buzzati from his new collection, Catastrophe.
