TODAY: In 1934, Russian novelist, poet, theorist, communist, and literary critic Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, better known by the pen name Andrei Biely, dies.
- “I always thought that death itself seemed indecent to him.” Gabriel García Márquez remembers his dearest friend, Julio Cortázar. | Lit Hub
- An accidental pilgrimage: on living at Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’s “poetical” Boston address, 9 Willow. | Lit Hub
- Five writers, seven questions, no wrong answers: Sam Lipsyte, Karen Thompson Walker, and more take the Lit Hub Questionnaire. | Lit Hub
- “Is it for a celebration that we have saved the best for last, the filet mignon to be eaten after the last chemotherapy?” On food, family, and a mother’s illness. | Lit Hub
- Five great books you might have missed in December, from a metafictional murder mystery to tales of amputation. | Lit Hub
- From a futuristic Tokyo noir to an epidemic of sleeping sickness, Leah Schnelbach recommends 5 Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books to Warm Your January. | Book Marks
- John Prendergast and Fidel Bafilemba, coauthors of Congo Stories: Battling Five Centuries of Exploitation and Greed, share five books about the Congo. | Book Marks
- The CrimeReads editors round up 110 of the year’s most anticipated crime and mystery releases, so you’ll never run out of books again! | CrimeReads
- On the work and legacy of Eugène Delacroix, “the last great literary painter.” | The Nation
- Sally Rooney has won the Costa Novel Award for Normal People, making her the youngest ever recipient of the prize. | Irish Times
- “The analogy for me is that we’re all going to be dead before long, but this doesn’t stop us from trying to help the people we love. In fact, it makes us want to help them all the more.” Jonathan Franzen on climate change, hope(lessness), and (of course) birds. | Sierra
- “The letters of history’s greatest thinkers then become a case study in documented recklessness.” On the correspondence of Guy Davenport, Hugh Kenner, and other writers. | Lapham’s Quarterly
- “This is a literary once-a-day multivitamin to keep your body going a little bit longer.” On Tracy K. Smith’s new daily poetry podcast, The Slowdown. | Electric Literature
- As support from universities declines, how can small literary journals survive? | Inside Higher Ed
- A new biography looks at how Justice John Marshall shaped the Supreme Court along partisan lines. (Sound familiar?) | The New Republic
Also on Lit Hub: Chloe Scheffe on creating the cover for Jenny Hval’s Paradise Rot • The near-impossibility of editing Proust • Read from The Handsome Monk and Other Stories
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