TODAY: In 1898, poet Melvin Tolson is born.
- “Mary Shelley = GOAT.” Lidia Yuknavitch on Frankenstein, incarceration, and overcoming creative blocks. | Lit Hub
- And the nominees for the Fourth Annual Made-Up Oscars for Books are… [drops envelope, trips] | Lit Hub
- “You almost get the sense Alexander Hamilton was being catfished through the presidential ether.” Liesl Schillinger on the Founders inability to conceive of a president like Trump. | Lit Hub Politics
- Remembering legendary editor Alice Mayhew. | Lit Hub
- When we call a book “cinematic,” what do we really mean? Sarah Kozloff on the cross-pollination of art forms. | Lit Hub
- Seventy-five years after the historic summit that changed the world, Diana Preston gives a day-by-day account of what Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill got up to at the Yalta Conference. | Lit Hub History
- “The phenomenon of police torture has an impact on people all across the globe.” Laurence Ralph, in an open letter to the future mayors of Chicago. | Lit Hub Politics
- Lessons from a model outsider: What Lawrence of Arabia understood about the Middle East. | Lit Hub History
- Lessons from a model outsider: What Lawrence of Arabia understood about the Middle East. | Lit Hub
- Peter Biskind on an ode to Chinatown, Michael Dirda on a lost Claude McKay novel, and more of the Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
- Wendy Heard celebrates a dazzling array of women-authored crime fiction coming out of LA in 2020. | CrimeReads
- “What she is doing, her friend the novelist Adam Ross told me, is coming as close as anyone ever has to writing the very nature of being itself.” Parul Sehgal profiles Jenny Offill. | The New York Times Magazine
- How Charles Dickens came to be buried in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner—against his wishes. | Smithsonian Magazine
- Roses are high, violets below them; celebrate Valentine’s Day with 14 love poems. | Poets.org
- Barnes & Noble’s canceled plan to feature people of color on the covers of classic books amounted to “a performative promotional tool,” Michael Harriot writes. | The Root
- “Think about the worst thing you’ve ever lived through, and then imagine returning to it, diving into it again and again, over the course of years.” Ingrid Rojas Contreras on American Dirt and drilling into trauma for thrillers. | The Cut
- Patti Smith will receive the PEN America Literary Service Award at a ceremony in May. | PEN America
- Martin Dumont on sailing, seas, and what shipyards can teach us about the writing process. | The New York Review of Books
Also on Lit Hub: A poem from Mark Bibbins’ collection 13th Balloon • How does focusing on the self affect a woman’s sex life? • Read an excerpt from Sue Rainsford’s debut novel Follow Me to Ground.
