TODAY: In 1922, the first issue of Reader’s Digest is published. Suspecting early 20th-century Americans were overloaded with information, DeWitt Wallace founded the monthly publication to aggregate information; Wallace’s wife, Lila, thought the magazine would be popular among housewives “and newly liberated working girls.”
- “I needed help because I was the one who carried the psychic burden of our home, its physical state, all the time.” Laura Cronk considers ghosts and the gendered work of cleaning house. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Russell Shorto on realizing that his grandfather was a small-town mobster and (reluctantly) deciding to write a book about it. | Lit Hub
- “Stay because this city belongs to the living. To us.” Molly Crabapple has a message for New Yorkers, as we reach a year of COVID-19. | Lit Hub
- “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life” and other nonsense men told 18th-century “Lady Novelists.” | Lit Hub History
- The 45 best prison escape films, ranked, from Olivia Rutigliano. | CrimeReads
- New titles from Melissa Broder, Lauren Oyler, and Dantiel W. Moniz all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
- Today in strongly held opinions about punctuations: an argument against brackets in quotes. | Slate
- “I published my first novel when I was 55, which means I spent more than half a century avoiding writing, evading that failure.” David Duchovny on reading Beckett and failing better. | The Atlantic
- A scientific investigation of the gut-brain connection (or: does reading really help you poop?). | Mel Magazine
- Christopher Hitchens’ widow and literary agent are discouraging family and friends from talking to the author of an upcoming biography on him. | The New York Times
- “An unconditional compassion for the human condition is the one true gift I believe a writer can give the world.” Femi Kayode on writing about human behavior. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- How authors are trying to reimagine the world of Sherlock Holmes, much to the chagrin of Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate. | The Guardian
- Very Online: Megan Marz discusses Fragments of an Infinite Memory and the role of the internet in contemporary novels. | The Baffler
Also on Lit Hub: Nadav Eyal on the rise of neo-fascism in contemporary Germany • Natalie Shapero’s poem, “Sunshower” • Read from Jen Silverman’s debut novel, We Play Ourselves
