TODAY: In 1940, novelist and poet James Welch is born.
- “The landscape of queer fiction is brilliant, shimmering, vast, a dream.” Talking to novelist Patty Yumi Cottrell. | Lit Hub
- “I submitted my work and waited. And waited. Fifteen months, I waited. Only after I threatened lawyering up did the process gain some speed.” Government security clearance isn’t always great for your writing career. | Lit Hub
- “Dr. Theodore then leans forward and confides,’ I mean, who wants to be the guy who paralyzes Michael J. Fox?’” Who indeed. | Lit Hub Memoir
- “Putting together a reading list for a new creative writing program, I saw an opportunity to diversify and decolonize.” Take a sneak peek at Alex Lockwood’s syllabus. | Lit Hub
- “Political language has lost the impact of faith and conviction, it is emptied of meaning.” Dubravka Ugrešić wonders if “democracy” has lost all meaning. | Lit Hub Politics
- “These coming weeks and months will be, for many, the saddest time of the year.” If the real doesn’t have you down, Simon Han has some unhappy holiday literature to get you across the finish line. | Lit Hub
- “Working on JR consumed my life . . . When it was all over, I cried.” Meet Nick Sullivan, the audiobook narrator who tackled William Gaddis’ enormous, dialogue-filled, “unreadable” masterpiece, and lived to tell about it. | The Guardian
- “There’s no such thing as lost steps!” Matthew Beaumont on André Breton and the politics and poetics of walking in the city. | The Paris Review
- Kayla Rae Whitaker on why the film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy is the last thing Americans need in 2020. | Electric Literature
