TODAY: In 1896, Oscar Wilde’s Salome premieres in Paris (while Wilde was in prison).
- “Reading Jenny Offill’s work feels like taking flight.” Kristin Iversen talks to the author of Weather. | Lit Hub
- Daniel Mallory Ortberg on coming to terms with his trans identity, and with the end of Golden Girls. | Lit Hub
- “Names and veils can both be draped over a thing; both can make it harder to see the real outlines of the thing itself.” Clare Beams on Womb-Furies, hysteria, and other misnomers of the feminine condition. | Lit Hub History
- Last days at Yalta: Diana Preston on Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the conference that shaped a century. | Lit Hub History
- Emily Nemens, Charles Yu, Christopher Bollen, and more take the Lit Hub Author Questionnaire. | Lit Hub
- “In time, they seemed written for me.” Vivian Gornick on the solace and revelation of Natalia Ginzburg. | Lit Hub
- Failsafe reading recommendations for your non-reader friend in need, from Real Simple magazine to (basically any) genre fiction. | Lit Hub
- “You can never let yourself forget that the others in your story are as real as you.” Adrienne Miller on David Foster Wallace and literary life in the 1990s. | Lit Hub
- Does Bong Joon-Ho’s historic Oscar win signal real change for the Academy Awards? | Lit Hub Film
- Kate Winkler-Dawson on early forensic science and the identification of murder victims. | CrimeReads
- Vivian Gornick recommends five books that made a difference in her writing life, from Little Virtues to The House of Mirth. | Book Marks
- Want to spend your Valentine’s Day reading? Here’s a “love story” (I mean, Missouri’s is Gone Girl) for every state. | The New York Times
- Is Emma Woodhouse—Jane Austen’s “ultimate insider”—the consummate unlikable heroine? | JSTOR
- Amazon is quietly removing some “hate-filled books” from its site, but its official rules on what material is forbidden remain unclear. | The New York Times
- The city of San Diego named Ron Salisbury, a longtime poet and educator, its first poet laureate. | Times of San Diego
- Eric Nusbaum on the legacy of the late Roger Kahn, whose writings about the lives of baseball players helped make the sport more accessible to the average reader. | Slate
- James Wood on the mythical tricksters of Daniel Kehlmann’s “daringly discontinuous” work. | The New Yorker
- “The art of poetry persists in this country; like a genetically evolved organism, it adapts.” Luis J. Rodriguez reflects on his experience as poet laureate of Los Angeles. | Los Angeles Times
Also on Lit Hub: A novel that celebrates—and mourns—pre-revolutionary Iran: Dina Nayeri on Javad Djavaher’s My Part of Her • Leila Aboulela recommends five books with a decidedly mystical dimension • Read an excerpt from Éric Dupont’s newly-translated novel The American Fiancée (trans. Peter McCambridge).
