TODAY: In 1955, writer Barbara Kingsolver is born.
- A civil war that never ended: Philip Dray on Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s new book and the “glorious failure” of Reconstruction. | Lit Hub
- “I’m an artist who has chosen to write what he cannot paint, cannot know.” Chris Rush on finding the medium to confront the ghosts of his past. | Lit Hub
- “A female Instagram influencer weaponizes her femininity in a corporate sense; for Villanelle, the act is chillingly literal.” The allure of Killing Eve’s cool-girl assassin. | Lit Hub
- André Breton, Leonora Carrington, Kobo Abe, and more: your starter kit for the weird and wonderful world of surrealist literature. | Lit Hub
- “What’s interesting about a project to communicate 10,000 years in the future is that we think it can be done.” On attempts to warn future humans of the poison we’ve buried. | Lit Hub
- Read a poem by Jericho Brown from his collection The Tradition. | Lit Hub
- From the Anti-Masonic Party to Alex Jones: how conspiracy theories came to dominate American culture. | Lit Hub
- “It might seem like an obvious thing to say, but you’re in the heart of publishing here.” Talking to Benjamin Rybeck, bookseller at the Center for Fiction. | Lit Hub
- This week in Shhh…Secrets of the Librarians: the Lego Librarian on Hervé Tullet, Caps For Sale, and the Wand Choosing the Wizard. | Book Marks
- “Was Dick out of his depth? Or had he gone far deeper than he could describe with words?” Kristopher Jansma on The Owl in Daylight, Philip K Dick’s unfinished novel. | Electric Literature
- “Much of contemporary poetry has become something of an assembly line, turning out verbal representations of minor occurrences in the poet’s daily life.” Has contemporary poetry become a narcissistic echo chamber? | The Walrus
- File under Surprising, Delightful: Harold Bloom’s literary obsession is a 1920 fantasy novel. | Jewish Review of Books
- “That horse’s head is different than the others.” Nathan Englander revisits Picasso’s Guernica. | The Paris Review
- Experimental novelist Jonathan Baumback has died at 85. | The New York Times
- “An exemplar of the exact sort of commentary that uses religious vocabulary to describe our current moment”: On evangelicalism, American politics, and Meghan O’Gieblyn’s Interior States. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Apparently, Donald Trump is already eager to write the “tell-all” memoir of his presidency. | VICE
Also on Lit Hub: Red state blues: on traveling in transition • The misunderstood consequences of electroconvulsive therapy • Read a story by Olivia Clare from Zyzzyva No. 114
