TODAY: In 1784, in a letter to his daughter, Benjamin Franklin expresses his unhappiness over the eagle as the symbol of America.
- You deserve a work break: here’s (one of) Joan Didion’s seminal essay(s), “Why I Write.” | Lit Hub
- “Reading wasn’t just about imagining myself a man; it was about imagining, period.” P. Carl on the 22 books that helped him write about transitioning. | Lit Hub
- Indie bookstores are having a hell of time trying to survive the pandemic—yet they remain the “connective tissue between knowledge and action” on our way to the revolution. | Lit Hub
- “What, once we’ve finally been forced to see what’s under our noses, will any of us actually do?” Carys Davies on writing about political crisis. | Lit Hub
- Astrophysicist Avi Loeb investigates that giant interstellar object that passed through our solar system (please tell us you haven’t forgotten about ‘Oumuamua!). | Lit Hub Science
- How reading fiction helped Maurice Chammah write better journalism (plus, his reading list). | Lit Hub
- Eliza Jane Brazier looks at 10 novels that explore true crime fandom. | CrimeReads
- A month of literary listening: AudioFile’s best audiobooks of January. | Book Marks
- From Nabokov on Nausea to Hughes on Baldwin, The New York Times Book Review looks back at 25 of its best reviews (and most important reviewers) from the last 125 years. | The New York Times
- “Leonora Carrington recognizes this subversive, eccentric position of womanhood.” Olga Tokarczuk on The Hearing Trumpet and the feminism of eccentricity. | The Paris Review
- The author of I Hate Men discusses misandry—“an intolerable brutality that adds up to the shocking outrage of precisely zero deaths and zero casualties.” | The Daily Beast
- Rafia Zakaria on Saadat Hasan Manto and the colonialist legacy of literary bans. | Lapham’s Quarterly
- On Raven Leilani’s Luster and narrators that “reverse the gazes of centuries” in their portrayals of whiteness. | Ploughshares
- “Didion worked hard at her sentences, and no magazine journalist has done better than her best. But style is just the baseline of good writing. Didion’s innovation was something else.” Nathan Heller’s grand unified theory of Joan Didion. | The New Yorker
- This year, a number of books entering the public domain were written by authors of the Harlem Renaissance. | JSTOR Daily
Also on Lit Hub: A brief history of the death penalty in America • Danielle Gellar traces her mother’s footsteps through artifacts left behind • Read an excerpt from Tove Ditlevsen’s newly translated novel, The Copenhagen Trilogy (ed. Tiina Nunnally).
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