TODAY: In 1952, Agatha Christie’s murder-mystery play The Mousetrap opens at the Ambassadors Theatre, London.
- Here are the 78 best book covers of the year, according to the best designers in the industry. | Lit Hub
- “Why would you have children in this uncertain world?” How two new books grapple with the ethics of parenthood. | Lit Hub
- Five great small press audiobooks to gift anyone on your list (including yourself). | Lit Hub
- “I wanted a text that tumbled down the page, never arriving at a full stop.” On reading John Cage in Reykjavik. | Lit Hub
- Leila Taylor and M. Lamar discuss the long history of Afrogoth, from Toni Morrison to Kara Walker and beyond. | Lit Hub
- Two poems by Dan Beachy-Quick from his collection Variations on Dusk and Dawn. | Lit Hub
- “India isn’t by any means the worst, or most dangerous, place in the world—at least not yet—but perhaps the divergence between what it could have been and what it has become makes it the most tragic.” Arundhati Roy on the existential threat facing her country. | The Nation
- The joy and “loping beauty” of Paulé Bartón’s folktales. | The Paris Review
- A new edition of Spinoza’s Ethics, translated by George Eliot, promises to reveal more about her development as a novelist. | The Guardian
- Tommy Orange on trail running, adjusting to literary fame, and writing the sequel to There There. | The Los Angeles Times
- “The fact remains that classics has been a force of imperialism, classism, racism, and colonialism since its inception.” On reckoning with the history of Latin. | Boston Review
- The debut novel by screenwriting heavyweight Charlie Kaufman, the mind behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Adaptation, is about a washed-up film critic who comes across a movie that’s… 3 months long. | Entertainment Weekly
- Some historians believe playwright John Fletcher finished writing Henry VIII after Shakespeare died. With the help of machine learning, one academic claims to have shown which parts of the play were written by one or the other. | MIT Technology Review
Also on Lit Hub: A poem from Stephen Dunn’s new collection Pagan Virtues • Naguib Mahfouz’s daughter fights to preserve her father’s legacy • Read a story by Cheng Yi from Issue 5 of Spittoon (trans. Deva Eveland, Remington Gillis, and Yidian Liu).
