TODAY: In 1949, travel writer and explorer Helen Churchill Candee, a survivor of the RMS Titanic, dies.
- Wandering through the uncanny valleyof Laura van den Berg’s fictions. |Lit Hub
- From James Baldwin to Carson McCullers, ten little-known children’s booksby famous writers. |Lit Hub
- Socialism in the academy! MFAs for everyone! (Toward a more utopian pedagogy.) |Lit Hub
- And once you have your MFA, where do you get that big, fat advance? Oscar Villalon and Arthur Phillips discuss the finances of the writing life on Fiction/Non/Fiction; with Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan. |Lit Hub
- “Europe, where have you misplaced love?” Poet Athena Farrokhzad’s open letter to Europe. |Lit Hub
- Sally Rooney on Sheila Heti, Doreen St. Félix on Omarosa, and more: 5 book reviews you should read this week. | Book Marks
- Julia Keller returns to her opiate-ravaged hometown and ponders the power of literature to assuage despair. | CrimeReads
- “This is not a modern feminist question, it’s simply a narrative question.” Emily Wilson, Sholeh Wolpé, and Arshia Sattar talk about translating the classics. | Words Without Borders
- One way to read more: the New York Public Library is turning classic novels into Instagram stories, starting with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. | NYPL
- Is Amanda McKittrick Ros’s 1897’s novel Irene Iddesleigh the worst ever written? With its “cliched plot turns, winding, elaborate sentences . . . and truly bizarre ‘poetic’ expressions,” it sounds like some kind of pleasure to read either way. | The Washington Post
- “The story of Dorothy Porter Wesley, a pioneer in the field of library and information science, is also the story of the triumphant beginnings of a new discipline.” Remembering the black woman librarian who helped to safeguard black history. | JSTOR Daily
- Should you quit your day job to write that novel? Answer: probably not, but not for the reason you think. | The Cut
- “It’s a tall order, to just have a toddler hanging around all the time in a book and have it be readable.” Lydia Kiesling on making the labor of motherhood visible in fiction. | The Rumpus
- “I’d prefer my fiction exist in the world for me, in place of any public face. Absolved of the imperative to present a persona, I can just be a classy-looking footstool or something.” An interview with Ling Ma. | The Paris Review
