TODAY: In 1894, Aldous Huxley is born.
- Ainehi Edoro-Glines on the New York Times’ “Best Books of the Century” list and the inherent racism of reproducing the Euro-American view of literature. | Lit Hub
- Lauren Markham on why she almost quit journalism (and what made her come back). | Lit Hub Memoir
- “I fear the obvious so much that my evasions of it have sometimes made me ridiculous.” Phil Christman considers the poetics of place. | Lit Hub Craft
- Sarah Manguso’s Liars, Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc., and Shalom Auslander’s Feh: A Memoir all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- Justin Muchnick on his favorite novel of the Olympics: “Alexias is a universal sporting figure—and yet, because he is simultaneously Renault’s creation, he is also a unique one.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- “Without questions and doubts, without cataclysms and conflagrations, without volatility and unpredictability and turmoil, how would we create?” In praise of literary chaos. | Lit Hub Craft
- “At some time in the far distant future there was a very popular game—a total waste of time—that young people loved to play, much to the chagrin and occasional outrage of their parents.” Read from César Aira’s Festival & Game of the Worlds. | Lit Hub Fiction
- It’s about time: the Cambridge Dictionary adds “boop,” “the ick,” and more of your favorite meme phrases. | The Guardian
- On the life-changing power of memorizing a poem. | The Washington Post
- Christopher Benfey considers the parallels between Moby-Dick and “a dark time…like our own.” | New York Review of Books
- “There is a story we tell ourselves about beauty—that it is worth the pain. But true, abidingly resplendent beauty lies in the fact that, despite such harms, in the face of them, even against them, we continue to seek a better world.” Manjula Martin on Olivia Liang and the radical potential of gardening. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Revisiting R.L. Stein’s One Evil Summer: “There is no shortage of bizarre stories and credulity-straining plot twists in ‘90s teen horror books.” | Reactor
- Jennifer Feeley on translating some of Hong Kong’s most interesting literary voices. | Asymptote
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