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From Franzen to Kidneygate (with a prolonged pit stop in the land of Supply Chain Issues), we’ve finally reached the end of the Biggest Literary Stories of the Year.
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Against reading historical fiction to learn history: Juhea Kim considers how the onus of writing educational fiction falls unfairly on authors of color. | Lit Hub
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See ’em and weep: Inside the apartments of New York City literary legends, circa 1995. | Lit Hub Photography
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Adam Scovell on the enduring appeal of the most adapted ghost story of all time: Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. | Lit Hub Criticism
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Merve Emre on Simone de Beauvoir, Justin Taylor on Joy Williams, and more of the Best Book Reviews of 2021. | Book Marks
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“An Atlantic Monthly review warned that the book ‘might arouse in the unconcerned unnecessary interest or alarm or both.’” On the early days of queer YA lit. | JSTOR Daily
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Why Yiyun Li decided to lead a collective read-through of War and Peace on behalf of A Public Space. | The Millions
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How translating literature about trauma can help us decipher pain and recreate a language that allows people to better understand each other. | Catapult
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Judith Mackrell recommends books featuring female writers on the front lines of World War II. | Wall Street Journal
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Rob Madole recounts how the city of Dallas rediscovered a suppressed book on the politics of race. | Los Angeles Review of Books
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“Knowing the name highlights the entrenched and pervasive presence of racism: how it has seeped into everything in America, all the way down to our type.” Sarah K. Kramer on the origins of the “Jim Crow” typeface. | The Believer
Also on Lit Hub: Zahia Rahmani on discovering Ursula K. Le Guin in 2021 • Orhan Pamuk on a childhood memory of the seaside, in Turkish and English • Read a story from Iván Mándy’s newly translated collection, Postcard from London (tr. John Batki)
