TODAY: In 1906, Betti Alver, one of Estonia’s most notable poets, is born.
- “In the early days of a first draft, it doesn’t take much for a story to shift.” Nancy Star on the ways we can get lost, in writing and the woods. | Lit Hub Craft
- “Oxford is run on lines so frightfully cliquish. You have got to belong to the circle of the boys if you are to get along.” A young V.S. Naipaul writers a letter home to dad. | Lit Hub
- “The curious story of how a sticky discharge from billions of insect bodies became a vehicle for the globalization of audio culture.” Would we even have rock n’ roll if we didn’t have shellac? | Lit Hub History
- “I wasn’t ready yet for the implications of Black people as interpreters of outer space.” Ntozake Shange on Sun Ra and how she came to have her name. | Lit Hub
- “If one of them was awarded the prize, the winner would read a statement that rebuked the male-dominated awards hierarchy.” On the time Adrienne Rich turned down a National Book Award. | Lit Hub
- “Did you sometimes want to kill your husband after you had a baby?” Ellen O’Connell Whittet on the pandemic stress of writing while parenting. | Lit Hub
- Did somebody say “Toni Morrison marathon reading”? (No, but it’s happening, along with a ton more virtual literary events.) | Lit Hub
- Ed Caesar recommends five epic works of mountain literature, from Into Thin Air to Touching the Void. | Book Marks
- “The quality of her dreaming, its interior abstraction, is exquisite. Its wonder lies in how closed its shutters are to any mundane world, how far back the lanes and alleyways of its imagining recede from the proper nouns and pedestrianisms of our lives.” On Renee Gladman’s surreal architectures. | n+1
- Jan Morris, noted historian and travel writer, has died at the age of 94. | The Guardian
- Now is a great time to tackle this introductory reading list on socialism. | JSTOR Daily
- “Now we have room for routine and we make no objection to sitting outdoors in the cold, on stools.” Aysegul Savas on neighborly life during the pandemic. | The Paris Review
- Morgan Thomas on the rise of queer ecological novels, which “ask how our perception of what is ‘natural’ impacts our relationships with the environment and each other.” | Ploughshares
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