TODAY: In 1996, Marguerite Duras dies.
- Deb Olin Unferth didn’t expect to be writing from the point of view of a chicken—but here we are. | Lit Hub
- “I don’t want to be a part of a world that asks people to compromise themselves irreparably just in order to survive.” Hilary Leichter talks to Kristin Iversen. | Lit Hub
- Sixteen in Queens and in love with Lord Alfred Douglas: Dylan Byron on the self-discovery of early literary love. | Lit Hub
- “The practice of hope, of life against death, of edges and surviving, were what I wanted to write about.” Meditations from the great Robert Stone. | Lit Hub
- “The Age of Innocence feels, today, prescient in how it asks us to draw from the dramas of intimacy the power to imagine more profligately.” Sarah Blackwood on the lasting insights of Edith Wharton’s classic. | Lit Hub
- Mark Kurlansky recommends five books about magnificent fish, from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea to John McPhee’s The Founding Fish. | Book Marks
- Robert Stone recounts his time on the lam with Ken Kesey. | CrimeReads
- Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaraguan poet and priest who “defied the Roman Catholic Church in the 1980s by serving in the revolutionary Sandinista government of Nicaragua,” died Sunday at 95. | The New York Times
- “I don’t think about criticism in terms of authority. I think about it in terms of charm and persuasion, which anybody can possess.” How Parul Seghal gets it all done. | The Cut
- Next on the slate for Hillary and Chelsea Clinton? A children’s book about gardening, Grandma’s Gardens. | The Hill
- You shouldn’t steal from libraries, but if you must, make sure you get something really cool (like a fiberglass skeleton). | Mental Floss
- Yikes! Pete Buttigieg learned Norwegian to read the work of Erland Loe, but would the author even like a politician like him? | Jacobin
- “The very gesture of resisting or claiming the notion of Jewish literature points to broader questions in Jewish thought.” Clémence Boulouque on the label of “Jewish writer.” | Public Books
- “We hope you are only here for two weeks.” Lavender Au reports on her time in Covid-19 quarantine. | New York Review of Books
Also on Lit Hub: David Plouffe: How celebrities can leverage their influence for good in 2020 • A poem from Natalie Diaz’s new collection Postcolonial Love Poem • Read an excerpt from Celia Laskey’s debut novel Under the Rainbow.
