TODAY: In 1830, the première of Victor Hugo’s play “Hernani in Paris” elicits protests from the audience which sees it as an attack on Classicism.
- “How many women had read The Price of Salt and recognized themselves in Therese and Carol, believing themselves the only ones?” Antonia Angress discovers a secret literary love in the margins of the Patricia Highsmith classic. | Lit Hub
- Making sense of a bullshit society: A reading list by Malcolm Harris. | Lit Hub
- “I gave up writing about contemporary events a long time ago. I prefer dead people.” Erik Larson on writing life during the London Blitz. | Lit Hub
- “If a statue could sit up who was to say that it could not rise and walk?” Laura van den Berg writes in response to the art of Ria Patricia Röder. | Lit Hub
- Colum McCann on drinking with John Berger, returning to Ulysses, and telling writers block to fuck off. | Lit Hub
- Sierra Crane Murdoch follows the trail of a murder in the Dakota Badlands with a woman who takes matters into her own hands. | Lit Hub
- Gary Phillips on the life of African-American Arctic explorer Matthew Henson, and how historical fiction can help give real life figures their due. | CrimeReads
- The Professor and the Parson author Adam Sisman recommends five great books about con artists. | Book Marks
- “Space enough to run or shout at any given moment and a front row seat to some of the hardest truths of American history.” Jericho Brown, Ada Limón, and more poets discuss living in writing in the American South. | Southern Review of Books
- In defense of reading slowly. | Mel Magazine
- Now that the 31st annual ZORA! Festival has wrapped up in Eatonville, FL, one Florida newspaper looks back at Zora Neale Hurston’s life and influence. | Florida Today
- Former French prime minister Francois Fillon and his wife, Penelope, are on trial for fraud and, somehow, a literary magazine played a part in their fall from grace. | Los Angeles Times
- In celebration of Viola Roseboro’, the McClure’s fiction editor for whom “books were the connective tissue that gave relationships meaning.” | The Paris Review
- A pressing question for our times: Have we . . . murdered the apostrophe? | BBC
- In response to a coronavirus outbreak near Milan, the Bologna Book Fair will be postponed until May. | Publishers Weekly
Also on Lit Hub: “Winter”: A poem from Major Jackson’s collection The Absurd Man • Lessons from interviewing almost 300 authors • Read an excerpt from Pauline Holdstock’s new novel Here I Am!
