TODAY: In 1911, Chinese author and translator Yang Jiang is born.
- They think they can bully the truth: Rebecca Solnit on Trump, Putin, Weinstein, and the neverending lies. | Lit Hub
- From the elegance of Isherwood to the weirdness of the Source Family cult, Chiara Barzini on her favorite tales of Hollywood outsiders. |Lit Hub
- Scenes from the southern border: in conversation with asylum-seekers, activists, border guards, locals, and more. |Lit Hub
- “He was the best we’d ever seen.” Seth Sawyers on baseball, writing, and that fine and awful line between very good and actually great. |Lit Hub
- From Maya Angelou to Anthony Doerr, Leslie Schwartz on the books that kept her from falling apart in county jail. |Lit Hub
- “In art, the sky is not always blue and the grass, alas, is not always green.” Deborah Levy on 5 great books that unsettle boundaries. | Book Marks
- “She’s beguiled readers into insular bubble-worlds of suburban and small-town America.” Daneet Steffens profiles Megan Abbott. | CrimeReads
- “No one ever got lynched and thought, Well, at least this will lead inexorably to the civil-rights movement.” New short fiction by Zadie Smith. | The New Yorker
- After the dwindling of its biggest export Nokia in the mid-aughts, Finland needed a new brand—so they turned to literature. | The Paris Review
- “Often art pounds at the door where language barricades itself, and gradually the words start to spill out.” Krista Franklin on revision and the writing process. | Poetry Foundation
- An artifact of an important moment in literary history: on the iconic, eye-catching design of the mid-century African Writers Series. | Lapham’s Quarterly
- “It scared me as a teenager and it haunts me still.” Neil Gaiman is afraid of The Haunting of Hill House, and 12 other writers on the books that scare them the most. | The New York Times
- A hand-drawn map of the Hundred Acre Wood, from the endpapers of Winnie-the-Pooh, sold for $570,000, making it the most expensive book illustration ever sold at auction. | Melville House
- “To a family whose every move was watched and discussed, art offered an avenue to channel individual experience in a private mode.” How exiled members of the Romanov family used art to cope. | New York Review of Books
