TODAY: In 1890, The Picture of Dorian Gray is published (Lippincott’s editor feared the story was indecent, and without Wilde’s knowledge, deleted roughly five hundred words before publication.)
- Lit Hub Longform: Measuring the decline of America’s first company town, one sidewalk crack at a time… | Literary Hub
- The play’s the thing to catch the conscience of the
KingPresident: on the lasting power of the stories we tell on stage. | Literary Hub - Paul Beatty is tired of being called an “angry” writer. | Literary Hub
- Shorter, leaner, stronger: Olivia Clare on the art of literary compression. | Literary Hub
- Is Jeremy Corbyn the “unlikeliest leader ever?” asks David Graeber (and is that maybe a good thing?). | Literary Hub
- Benjamin Moser talks to Minae Mizumura about the Japanese “I-novel,” the eternal Internet, and the art of aging in print. | Literary Hub
- Loving the monsters too: On Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, one of Australia’s most beloved novels. | Book Marks
- On the intersection of “radical artistic thinking and obscure spiritual strivings” and the occult origins of the modernist movement. | The New Yorker
- “They were towed to shore and charged with the crime of hope.” An excerpt from Blind Spot by Teju Cole. | VICE
- She wrote as an enthusiast and a partisan: On the sexual anxieties and diaries of Susan Sontag. | Bookforum
- Larissa Pham on a new collection of essays by Mary Gaitskill, who “uses compassion as a conduit for interpretation.” | The Nation
- In which Tony Tulathimutte compares writing to “filling a waterbed with the moisture from your sighing.” | The Rumpus
- She knew what kind of subject she wanted to be: On Eve Babitz’s fiction and the line between writer and work. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Revisiting Eve Merriam’s “frighteningly prophetic. . . personal condemnation of an administration,” The Nixon Poems. | The Awl
Also on Lit Hub: On Donald Trump’s cameos throughout American literature · Five Books Making News: widows, war, and weight · “Have You Ever Tried?” by Anna Marschalk-Burns, new fiction from Slice.
