TODAY: In 1940, Gao Xingjian, Chinese émigré novelist, playwright, and painter who in 2000 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, is born.
- When women went blue: Eileen Pollack on the courage of groundbreaking female stand-ups, and the dirty, dirty jokes they told so well. | Literary Hub
- The best movies start as books: a look ahead at some much anticipated adaptations in 2018. | Literary Hub
- Sara Paretsky got tired of the vamp or victim portrayal of women in crime fiction, so she went ahead and created the great V.I. Warshawski. | Literary Hub
- Shakespearean romance, detective novel suspense, satire on academic fashions, and more: An early review of A.S. Byatt’s Possession. | Book Marks
- Reports about and an excerpt from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House have caused the President to disavow Steve Bannon (though some have questioned the credibility of Wolff’s account). | The Guardian, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Splinter
- “I knew it was a risky jump, and I had to be ready. I really wanted to fight for what I could do.” Nicole Chung interviews Kristi Yamaguchi. | Shondaland
- Roxane Gay on the books she read in 2017. | Roxane Gay
- Natalie Eilbert on the poetry of Mina Loy, “a distillation of Dickinson, a rogue sibling of Apollinaire.” | Granta
- “They don’t see themselves as predatory. . . they see individuals setting a new paradigm of behavior by pushing the boundaries of social mores and values.” From Emily Chang’s Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley. | Vanity Fair
- Here, transition, like revolution, was recast in aesthetic terms: On feminism, transphobia, and Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto. | n+1
- Fred Bass, who inherited Strand Bookstore from his father and turned it into a legendary destination, has died at 89. | The New York Times
- Do you believe in love after life? How the spouses of two late memoirists—who wrote books about their own deaths—fell in love. | The Washington Post
Also on Literary Hub: Margaret Atwood in conversation with Andrew O’Hagan and John Freeman · The killer next door: Imagining the dark suburbs of Pittsburgh · Read from Gerty Dambury’s new novel, The Restless
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