TODAY: In 1948, a private assembly of 50 major literary and artistic figures listens to a recording of Antonin Artaud‘s play Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de dieu whose broadcast on French radio three days earlier has been prohibited.
- On the life-changing genius of Ursula K. Le Guin: four writers reflect on what she meant to them. | Literary Hub
- Confessions of a typewriter addict: one person’s junk, is another’s treasure. | Literary Hub
- From Virginia Woolf to N.K. Jemisin: 15 novels that subvert traditional gender roles. | Literary Hub
- Modern classic or self-indulgent slog? 5 early reviews of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. | Book Marks
- On the heralded Victorian writer Michael Field, who was, in actuality, a pair of lovers named Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper. | Lenny
- 30 publishers have signed a letter urging the Man Booker organizers, who allowed Americans to be considered for the prize in 2014, to reverse that decision. | The Guardian
- “He wanted, like Shakespeare, to reconcile the high and the low, the solemn and the vulgar.” Alejandro Zambra remembers Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, who died on January 23rd. | The New Yorker
- On Don DeLillo’s second novel End Zone, which “nails the omnipresent violence of football.” | The Paris Review
- “I wanted to write about an aspiring writer who was having trouble under. . . ‘the anxiety of influence.’” A profile of Lisa Halliday, whose debut novel Asymmetry evokes her relationship with Philip Roth. | The New York Times
- “The best women nature writers have leverage to be less sentimental, to tell a more complicated story.” An interview with Blair Braverman and Emily Ruskovich. | Adventure Journal
- On Jean Raspail’s cartoonishly violent and garishly racist 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, a fixture on alt-right forums (and allegedly one of Steve Bannon’s favorite books). | The New Republic
Also on Literary Hub: Europe’s new racism: Hanif Kureishi hasn’t seen anything like it • On sexual violence and silence • New fiction by Joanne Serling, from her new novel, Good Neighbors.
