Lit Hub Daily: February 1, 2018

TODAY: In 1996, David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest is published. 

• 16 books you should read this February. | Literary Hub
• This is August Wilson’s town: on the glories of a mid-century Pittsburgh. | Literary Hub
• “For concentration, you need a cat. Do you happen to have a cat?” And other pieces of indispensable advicefrom the great Muriel Spark. | Literary Hub
• Happy birthday Infinite Jest! 10 great literary works about TV. | Literary Hub
• Anne Enright on Martin Amis (the perfect person to write about the porn industry), Parul Sehgal on Dave Eggers (inspires both admiration and suspicion), and more: 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
• The National Book Foundation has announced a new prize recognizing international works in translation. | National Book Foundation
• “It is not possible to exist in this feeling all the time. This is not one of our capabilities—but look, the body says, lifting up into its improbable upper air, look, I’m doing it. Here is my world, for just one minute.” Patricia Lockwood on the beauty and brilliance of figure skater Jason Brown. | New York Times Magazine
• Heather Abel on motherhood, literary ambition, and The Baby Book, which “nearly derailed” her halfway through her novel. | The Paris Review
• “Most of [the novel] is not true except for the dog. I have a dog who’s exactly like this and that’s the true thing.” Kyle Lucia Wu interviews Weike Wang. | AAWW
• My mom and stepdad’s dream-come-true would be Jo and Chip’s waking nightmare: Xhenet Aliu on Fixer Upper and making a home. | BuzzFeed Reader
• “We are not in the end times: we are babies at the foot of a long staircase.” On Cixin Liu and China’s science fiction renaissance. | London Review of Books
• The Freedom of the Press foundation has launched an initiative to preserve publications whose archives are under threat from wealthy buyers, starting with Gawker and L.A. Weekly. | Freedom of the Press Foundation

Also on Literary Hub: Towards independence for a new generation of Pakistani women • On the death of JFK andthe birth of the “Great Society” • Read from Our Lady of the Prairie.

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