TODAY: In 1845, “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe is published in the New York Evening Mirror.
- “Black-eyed peas and rice or Hoppin’ John are not so much arbitrary predilections as they are symbolic defiance.” Recipes and wisdom from the late, great Ntozake Shange. | Lit Hub
- “The thing most likely to fill the hole is love, but love is fleeting, unreliable, conditional. Drugs are unconditional.” Brad Phillips on sex, drugs, and the empty spaces. | Lit Hub
- Novuyo Rosa Tshuma on writing absurdity in Zimbabwe’s contemporary Zimbabwe. | Lit Hub
- New poetry by Hala Alyan, from her collection The Twenty-Ninth Year. | Lit Hub
- All the Lives We Ever Lived author Katharine Smyth on five books about fathers, from James Salter’s Light Years to Hisham Matar’s The Return. Book Marks
- A close reading of The Great Gatsby as modern noir, from Lisa Levy. | CrimeReads
- “Reading The Portrait of a Lady, I realized that it would be radical if we could learn to see male self-involvement as actively unattractive.” On the (boring, generic) aesthetic sins of manipulative men. | The Baffler
- The Man Booker prize has lost its “Man”—and is now looking to nail down a new sponsor. Any takers? | The Guardian
- “Do you have anyone in mind to play the lead?”Juliet Lapidos on our enduring cultural obsession with the “screen potential” of novels. | The New Yorker
- “Everything in Western thinking is so binary…I think a lot of African storytelling is just more nuanced, more sophisticated than that.” Hari Kunzru interviews Marlon James. | WSJ Magazine
- “We must now fight for the idea of Europe or see it perish beneath the waves of populism.” 30 writers, historians, and Nobel laureates have signed a manifesto urging Europeans to resist the onslaught of nationalism. | The Irish Times
- The magical night when Patti Smith read Virginia Woolf and covered U2. | Noisey
- The consumer’s foil: How racist depictions in 19th-century ads influenced modern conceptions of the “ideal” shopper. | JSTOR Daily
Also on Lit Hub: So Many Damn Books reveals their favorite books of 2018 • What we can learn about happiness from women over 50 • In search of the surreal at the Leonora Carrington Museum • Read from The End of Loneliness
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