TODAY: In 1857, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is acquitted on charges of offending morals and religion from its 1856 expurgated serialization. It is published complete in book form in April by Michel Lévy Frères in Paris.
- Brilliance and blind spots: Gabrielle Bellot on rereading Joan Didion in this hard American winter of 2020. | Lit Hub Criticism
- “I would rebel, and hard.” Richard Wagamese on anti-Native racism and deciding to fight back. | Lit Hub Politics
- Sophia Leonard details Truman Capote’s unfinished investigation on Russian socialites (which would make for an amazing Netflix series). | Lit Hub
- “If the city ever knew what it was, it kept forgetting.” Sam Wasson the early day of Los Angeles detective fiction. | Lit Hub
- Some very doable steps toward a plant-based kitchen: Tips for batch cooking, meat alternatives, and more. | Lit Hub Food
- “With each passing awards season, [the Oscars] become ever more irrelevant.” The 2020 Oscar nominations prove that Hollywood still hasn’t seen through the smoke. | Lit Hub Film
- “I am crazy on the sea.” Finding liberation in the early years of the Women’s Royal Naval Service. | Lit Hub History
- Aya de Leon on American Dirt, commercial fiction, and the war between genre and literature. | CrimeReads
- New titles from Lidia Yuknavitch, Ben Okri, and Vivian Gornick all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
- Read a profile of Vikram Chandra, who built a program named Granthika to keep track of his complicated novels. | Wired
- Of course Dorothy Parker got fired from Vanity Fair for skewering the structures of the patriarchy (in a review of a Somerset Maugham play, no less). | Public Domain Review
- “One gift an artist might give to other artists is a demonstration of how to make work without shame.” Zadie Smith on Kara Walker. | NYRB
- What the American Dirt controversy revealed about Oprah, her book club, capitalism, and the iconography of pain. | Longreads
- Have you ever wanted to view life through Gregor Samsa’s eyes? A virtual reality installation in Prague lets users imagine life as a Kafkaesque bug. | The Hindu
- So you’re a white writer who wants to write outside your race! Here are some points to consider. | Brittle Paper
- Ten young readers recommend 10 books for kids to read this winter. | TIME
Also on Lit Hub: How Nazism’s rise in Europe spurred anti-Semitic movements in the US • Searching for queerness in the corners of history • Read an excerpt from Tola Rotimi Abraham’s debut novel Black Sunday.
