TODAY: In 1931, Shirley Hazzard, novelist, short story writer, and essayist, is born.
- How the very oldest of the old helped me figure out what happiness is: John Leland on his year among the 85-and-up crowd. | Literary Hub
- Jojo Moyes: What is the thing that makes me most happy? [Ed. please see above.] | Literary Hub
- Small Scottish publisher + Weimar-era detective series = international hit. On the inevitability of Babylon Berlin. | Literary Hub
- Mysteries, dragons, and old age: 5 books making news this week. | Book Marks
- “I have already formed the impression that my father is an excellent doctor. Though he will, in other ways, disappoint, disillusion, or unfavorably surprise me in the coming decades, this impression will stand.” Michael Chabon on his father’s secret superpower—and his own. | The New Yorker
- One year in, Jim Shepard, Rion Amilcar Scott, Joan Silber and 19 other writers imagine how this administration might end. | Scoundrel Time
- “To me she is one of the 20th-century writers most vitally, joyfully, seriously philosophically, aesthetically, and politically engaged with the living materials of history, and with her own time.” Ali Smith on Muriel Spark at 100. | The Guardian
- “I just always wanted to write, and it’s still the only thing I want, and I’m willing to give up almost all the other pleasures of life in order to secure this for myself.” An interview with Sheila Heti. | The Cardiff Review
- “Romance reminds us that women want, and it celebrates this fact. How sad that that’s subversive, but it is.” Jamie Green on the politics of the romance novel and the genre’s response to Trump. | BuzzFeed
- What makes a perfect subway read? According to Adam Sternbergh, it should feel “like the hypodermic needle that gets jabbed through Uma Thurman’s breastplate in Pulp Fiction.” | The New York Times
- “There are vacation photos and family photos; landscapes and photos of pets; clippings from newspapers and magazines; and, of course, the garden.” Harvard has digitized a photo album of Virginia Woolf’s. | Open Culture
