TODAY: In 1933, author of A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest J. Gaines, is born.
- “Brush hair vigorously at least 200 double strokes all over the head with a brush in each hand.” Please enjoy these illustrations from America’s first bestselling diet book. | Lit Hub
- “Language is our best and most powerful resource for bringing about social change.” On the science fiction novelist who created a feminist language from scratch. | Lit Hub
- “First you must believe you’re a writer.” On finally being able to say “I’m a writer” and mean it. | Lit Hub
- Chris Power on unconscious literary influences, and the time he unwittingly plagiarized Alice Munro. | Lit Hub
- “We’re not taking spaces in a masculine way, we’re doing it in a new way.” Samantha Schweblin on inhabiting the strange, and being compared to Kafka. | Lit Hub
- Crime fiction makes the best travel guides: rounding up all the best international fiction out this January. | CrimeReads
- Inheritance author Dani Shapiro on five memoirs that take big risks, from John Wickersham’s The Suicide Index to Roxane Gay’s Hunger. | Book Marks
- “This will be one of the most rewarding things in my life.” Gilbert King, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Devil in the Grove, speaks about the pardon of the Groveland Four, which his book helped set in motion. | Tampa Bay Times
- “It was—and remains—as easy to buy 1984 and Animal Farm in Shenzhen or Shanghai as it is in London or Los Angeles.” On the complexity of censorship in China. | The Atlantic
- Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, Truman Capote: the literary allusions you might have missed in the premiere of the third season of True Detective. | Vanity Fair
- “People have looked away for so long, but I don’t think they can anymore.” On the intensifying hunt for the millions of books stolen by the Nazis. | The New York Times
- After 24 years and 3,000 handwritten pages later, Robert Alter has completed a new English-language translation of the Hebrew Bible. | NPR
- When the insightful reader replaces the dutiful author: How literary scholars helped bring about the “death of the author.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
- “The afterlife is an old room in the house of the human imagination, and the ancients loved to offer the tour.” How the idea of hell has shaped the way we think. | The New Yorker
Also on Lit Hub: Read an extract from Hannah Sullivan’s Three Poems, winner of this year’s T.S. Eliot Prize • A poem by Dorianne Laux from her collection Only As the Day Is Long • Read from Hear Our Hearts
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