TODAY: In 1944, novelist, short story writer, and essayist, Joy Williams, is born.
- “Sense and Sensibility deals with how individuals make meaningful lives in a world that is often deeply unfair.” Devoney Looser wonders what Jane Austen would choose in the end, sense or sensibility. | Lit Hub
- “It’s easy to get too gummily sentimental about siblings. You don’t have to love your family members.” Sophie MacKintosh on the shared language of sisterhood. | Lit Hub
- Killing a symbol: a brief history of western writers’ obsession with the tiger. | Lit Hub
- “As the color of my pots came from the interplay of fire, water, earth, and air, so did the color of the sea.” On the intoxicating alchemy of pottery. | Lit Hub
- Robert Feiseler examines the immediate aftermath of the Up Stairs Lounge fire in 1973 New Orleans, when police indifference allowed for a suspected arsonist to flee the scene. | CrimeReads
- Tainted Love: Heather Cleary’s translation picks for Valentines Day. | Book Marks
- Robert Feiseler examines the immediate aftermath of the Up Stairs Lounge fire in 1973 New Orleans, when police indifference allowed for a suspected arsonist to flee the scene. | CrimeReads
- “Woolf and three other members of the emerging Bloomsbury group played a hoax on the H.M.S. Dreadnought by impersonating the emperor of Abyssinia and his retinue.” Kevin Young on the time Virginia Woolf wore blackface. | The New Yorker
- “Maybe they are a gateway for talking to children about America’s colonialist history. Or maybe not.” Is it time to put down the Little House books? | Smithsonian Mag
- “What we’re talking about here are sets of facts that I borrowed.” Jill Abramson’s response to those plagiarism charges. | Vox
- “What dazzled us was the audacity of a young writer who was starting on such an original path.” Read a profile of Valeria Luiselli. | The New York Times
- Why Melville House published the climate report Trump tried to hide. | Electric Literature
- Kazuo Ishiguro is now officially a knight. Congratulations, Sir Ishiguro! | Vanity Fair
- “The communion we seek, scanning titles or turning pages, is not with others—not even the others, living or long dead, who wrote the words we read—but with ourselves.” On reading in the age of constant distraction. | The Paris Review
Also on Lit Hub: Maris Kreizman on But That’s Another Story • Reading Briallen Hopper and rethinking the marriage plot • Johannes Lichtman in conversation with Peter C. Baker • Read from American Spy
