TODAY: In 1919, Sylvia Beach opens the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore in Paris.
- “The essay is by its very nature and nomenclature an experiment.” Talking to Phillip Lopate about what makes a great American essay. | Lit Hub
- “This kind of dancing in the streets felt like articulation.” Brianna Zimmerman on protest, the post office, and the politics of joy. | Lit Hub Politics
- First love is so intense: the Center for Fiction First Novel prize finalists on the books that won their young hearts. | Lit Hub
- “It was not even clear to anyone exactly what he was healing, or how.” On the mysterious celebrity miracle worker of postwar Germany. | Lit Hub History
- Scenes from a marriage: Michael Rabagliati draws the rise and fall of a 30-year relationship, one panel at a time. | Lit Hub
- Megan Hunter recommends five books about women transformed, from Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber to Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing. | Book Marks
- “Is it still cool to memorize a lot of stuff? Is there even a reason to memorize anything?” On Wikipedia, Jeopardy!, and the fate of the fact. | The New Yorker
- After 50 years,“the great white whale of science fiction”—an anthology of works by major names edited by Harlan Ellison—is finally going to be published. | The Guardian
- Thanks, Obama: the former president’s memoir is poised to save Christmas for lots of booksellers impacted by the pandemic. | The New York Times
- From titles by Imani Perry to James Baldwin, Kiese Laymon shares six titles that have inspired him. | The Week
- “I wanted to be writing poetry, but I had to find out, as best I could, what the hell happened in Tijuana…” Betsy Bonner talks to Jeannie Vanasco about the infinite aftershocks of family tragedy. | Lit Hub Memoir
- “The best explicitly political art that has emerged during the Trump presidency has not been about Trump at all.” Sophie Haigney breaks down the effects of the Trump presidency on the art world. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- “California became the model eugenic state in the 1910s.” American history just keeps on giving. | Lit Hub History
- “I needed to write a book that was a snapshot in time, but that was also a fair appraisal of what my life had been like and what it feels like for a child of immigrants.” Karla Cornejo Villavicencio on the difficulties of writing about migration. | CNN
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