TODAY: In 1883, Japanese novelist and short story writer Naoya Shiga is born.
- “Hopscotch revealed to me that literature was about playing (playing seriously and devotedly, the way children do).” Valeria Luiselli on freedom, first love, and Mayan ruins. | Lit Hub
- Pearl Harbor was not the worst thing to happen to the U.S. on December 7, 1941: Daniel Immerwahr on the erasure of American “territories” from U.S. History. | Lit Hub
- “Champawat was not an incident of nature gone awry—it was in fact a man-made disaster.” On the tiger that killed over 400 people. | Lit Hub
- “I still love the book. It’s a book I can’t defend, and a book I can’t renounce.” Eula Biss reflects on her first book, and a decade of whiteness. | Lit Hub
- “To be prized as a specimen of the powers of the Black Race, which prejudice persists in disputing”: an 1845 review of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. | Book Marks
- Michael Gonzales on Chester Himes’ long out-of-print classic “Run Man Run,” a gritty dive into mid-century prejudice in New York City. | CrimeReads
- Elizabeth Strout, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Carmen Maria Machado and more of your favorite writers on how they managed to pay the bills while they wrote (and continue to write!) their books. | Medium
- Meet the scientist who is learning about the past by testing the DNA found in old books. After all, they used to be made out of animal skins. | The Atlantic
- “The mind becomes locked into an obsessive, manic back-and-forth. Interruption is constant but also desired.” How we write differently on a screen. | The New Yorker
- Meg Wolitzer annotates a page from her novel The Wife—the film adaptation is up for an Academy Award. | PBS NewsHour
- “All technology predictions are fundamentally blinkered by our current social reality.” Can science fiction predict the future of technology (and does it care)? | JSTOR
- Jedediah Britton-Purdy on Martin Hägglund ’s This Life and the philosophical heart of democratic socialism. | The New Republic
- “Novels that don’t have humor in them are not realistic, and the opposite is also true.” Maris Kreizman profiles Elizabeth McCracken. | BuzzFeed
Also on Lit Hub: Literary Disco talks children’s books • Madhuri Vijay talks to Brad Listi on Otherppl • The best fiction of anxiety • Ben Rybeck on Best Adapted Screenplay nominee Blackkklansman • Read from American Pop
