TODAY: In 1918, Nobel Prize laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian novelist, historian, short story writer, and an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and communism, is born.
- For the first time ever in English, read the youthful sonnets Walter Benjamin wrote in the wake of his beloved’s suicide. | Literary Hub
- You won’t believe what happens next: Watch the only recorded footage of Clarice Lispector, in a very rare interview. (Ok, you can probably guess what happens next.) | Literary Hub
- On war, satire, and the novels of Irène Némirovsky: Patrick Nathan on how to cook your way through the end times. | Literary Hub
- “Like other addicting substances, this work creates a hunger for itself.” John Ashbery on Elizabeth Bishop’s The Complete Poems. | Book Marks
- “Our conflict is not over sex, or with men in particular or in general, but over power.” Melissa Gira Grant on workplace harassment and #MeToo. | New York Review of Books
- He made his characters vulnerable: John Jeremiah Sullivan, Leslie Jamison, and more on the legacy of David Foster Wallace’s journalism. | Longreads
- On the intersection of comics and punk: Matt Groenig, Gary Panter, and the DIY ethic. | Literary Hub
- “As a mongrelized human being, I don’t find the world around us satisfactory.” Mohsin Hamid on Pakistan, migration, and the limits of western humanism. | The Guardian
- Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, the journalists who broke the story of Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual misconduct and abuse, are writing a book. | The New York Times
- “People have weird ideas about writing and being a writer. I feel like I just have to do my part to explain why maybe those things aren’t all correct.” An interview with Carmen Maria Machado. | The Creative Independent
- Her griefs were ordinary; it is what she did with them that wasn’t: on the revelations of a new, unedited volume of Sylvia Plath’s letters. | The New Yorker
- “One begins a Krasznahorkai story like a free diver, with a deep inhalation before plunging in.” Nathaniel Rich on László Krasznahorkai. | The Atlantic
Also on Literary Hub: The mysteries of Kobo Abe: Reading Abe through Edgar Allan Poe · Why I hate Christmas but love certain Christmas songs · Read from E.F. Granell’s surrealist classic, The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian
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