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“I’ve exhausted the bullshit of expectation, and I’m no longer trying to please.” Sara Lippmann’s manifesto for sounding like yourself. | Lit Hub Craft
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OSCARS WEEK: In part three of our literary look at this year’s Best Picture Nominees, we recommend what to read (and watch) if you liked The Power of the Dog and Nightmare Alley. | Lit Hub Film
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Alexa Schmitt-Bugler considers the allure of grimdark fantasy, a genre (and feeling) that “clearly isn’t much concerned with sunlit castles and true-hearted knights.” | Lit Hub Criticism
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Helen Humphreys reflects on the “slippage” between her world and Sylvia Plath’s. | Lit Hub
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Twenty years after Secretary: How would Mary Gaitskill’s short story about workplace sexual abuse—originally adapted as “a kinky rom-com with a happy ending”—be made today? | Lit Hub Film
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“Sometimes, fitting a masterpiece into a novel can feel like trying to get a mattress into hatchback.” Joe Mungo Reed on the challenges of placing real art in fiction. | Lit Hub Craft
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Michael Lewis, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Tommy Orange, and more rapid-fire book recs from Elissa Washuta. | Book Marks
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Sara A. Mueller on the most successful madam in US history. | CrimeReads
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Charley Locke recommends the practice of keeping a commonplace book, “filled with quotes, lines from books and songs and poems and conversations that stuck with me.” | The New York Times
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“If a book is challenged, it probably means that it’s saying something honest and vulnerable and true.” Maia Kobabe reflects on authoring a memoir that’s been banned from some schools. | Slate
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Justin E. H. Smith on the internet and why social media is only “a simulation of discussion and debate.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
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“I live in the hope that, for all of my writing about us, I remain a friend, and not the stranger you should never have trusted.” Pico Iyer reflects on decades of letters to a man he met, once, in Myanmar. | Guernica
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Dionne Brand, Simone Browne, Lauren Michele Jackson, Claire Schwartz, and Adania Shibli revisit Toni Morrison’s only published short story, “Recitatif.” | Jewish Currents
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“Time is not a river. It’s a lake.” Samantha Hunt on alcohol and the hauntings of family history. | The New Yorker
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Why don’t we acknowledge the danger that public librarians face? | Electric Literature
Also on Lit Hub: John Markoff on the Merry Pranksters’ Trips Festival, a supersize acid test • A poem by Maja Haderlap, translated by Tess Lewis • Read from Alejandro Varela’s debut novel, The Town of Babylon
