TODAY: In 1881, the first edition of the LA Times is published.
- “Critics still don’t entirely know what to do with us.” The Impostor Poets of Iceland have issued their manifesto. | Lit Hub
- Elaine Stritch’s never-ending quest to get her due: On Alexandra Jacobs’ biography of an icon. | Lit Hub Biography
- “The book asks us to consider a very simple truth: a life is a life, no matter where that life lives.” The Good Place creator Michael Schur on Peter Singer’s moral challenge. | Lit Hub
- Actually, cheaters often prosper: J.M. Fenster examines the motivations of rule-breakers. | Lit Hub Science
- On the subversive creatives who defied authoritarian rule in Zimbabwe. | Lit Hub
- The Art of the Hand-Sell: 13 indie booksellers rave about their favorite reads. | Book Marks
- “Collins didn’t just write female characters who acted outside of Victorian norms: he rebelled against them himself.” Inside Willkie Collins’ complicated approach to marriage, on and off the page. | CrimeReads
- How one translator (and writer and lawyer and programmer) made Chinese science fiction huge in America. | The New York Times Magazine
- A scholar who studies the way literary prizes influence taste and canons turns her eye on two major African prizes, the Caine and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. | Quartz
- “I think other literary problems were at the core of his inability to finish the novel”: an interview with Robert Callahan, Ralph Ellison’s literary executor. | KGOU
- Robert K. Massie, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who wrote about czarist Russia, has died at 90. | Los Angeles Times
- “Despite their messiness, obscurity and fictions, individual lives are the stitches of the past.” On the distance between memoir and history. | History Today
- Two books confront the “masculinity crisis,” with very different results. | Longreads
- “The famous suspension of disbelief that operates in the reading of a novel also functions in reading a translation.” Alejandro Zambra on translation. | The Believer
Also on Lit Hub: Announcing the winners of Reading Women’s 2019 Award • What your draft (and its problems) says about you • Sean Brock on the ingenuity, soul, and care that created “Southern cuisine” • Read an excerpt from Olaf Olafsson’s latest novel The Sacrament.
