TODAY: In 1895, the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty is registered in England and begins acquiring properties and making them accessible to the public. The trust now owns Virginia Woolf cottage in East Sussex (above), George Bernard Shaw’s house in Hertfordshire, and William Wordsworth’s childhood home in Cumbria.
- Navigating the intricacies of race and the violence of antiblackness: Nadia Owusu reflects on her early years in America. | Lit Hub
- “What happens when you go through two decades of your life calling yourself Argentine but have never been to Argentina?” Daniel Loedel on nationality and identity. | Lit Hub
- Changing my sky: Sarah Moss on moving countries amid a pandemic. | Lit Hub
- “The process of translating is endless—and enlarging.” Will Schutt interprets Carlo and Renzo Piano. | Lit Hub
- The writer’s life’s work is finding out how delightful they are on the page, and other (delightful) revelations from George Saunders. | Lit Hub
- Here is your (wildly optimistic) 2021 calendar of literary events. | Lit Hub
- You can kill anyone but the dog: Sulari Gentill on crime fiction’s most unbreakable rule. | CrimeReads
- Is Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint the dirtiest literary novel ever published? | Book Marks
- “This amazing sense of fortitude and strength really came across to me.” Heather Clark on discovering more of Sylvia Plath’s story through research. | Slate
- Houman Barekat on death, digital innovation, and what we do with the accounts of people who have died. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Why do we keep rereading The Great Gatsby? Wesley Morris has a few ideas. | The Paris Review
- Hundreds of historians and constitutional scholars, including Ron Chernow and Stacy Schiff, have signed an open letter calling for Trump’s (re)impeachment. | The New York Times
- “While it may well be that no book has ever prevented genocide or fascism, we still have a necessity for literature to testify to the political conditions of our lives.” On the literature of bearing witness. | Zocalo Public Square
- Revisiting 1965’s The Gay Cookbook, which “helped expose the very normalcy of queerness.” | JSTOR Daily
- “I cannot think of another contemporary poet who is willing to expose his vulnerability, worry, and pettiness through the lens of humor.” John Yau makes the case for Robert Hershon as a major poet. | Hyperallergic
Also on Lit Hub: Koa Beck on what “feminist” settings too often lack • Who gets to tell the story of the Midwest? Amanda Page on parachute journalism and its opposite • Read from Mateo Askaripour’s debut novel Black Buck.
