TODAY: In 1862, Charles Dodgson sends the handwritten manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Underground to Alice Liddell.
- Meet the showgirl who discovered Lolita: Sarah Weinman on the woman who helped Nabokov’s masterpiece find its American publisher. | Lit Hub
- Why look at art when you could watch TV? On John Berger’s revolutionary art criticism. | Lit Hub
- The very best book covers of November. | Lit Hub
- “The rhythm of the body moving through space has been the motivating source of most of my work.” Hal Foster talks to Richard Serra about walking and making art. | Lit Hub
- “The family shared a desire to postpone, to delay forever, the acknowledgment of Nicky’s existence.” Richard Beard on writing his brother’s death, four decades later. | Lit Hub
- “Flying Above California”: a poem by Thom Gunn, from his collection New Selected Poems. | Lit Hub
- In honor of her 75th birthday, we look back at the first reviews of every Marilynne Robinson novel. | Book Marks
- “It’s not good news that Garp is still relevant. We should be ashamed that sexual intolerance is still tolerated, but it is.” John Irving wishes The World According to Garp was a period piece. | Esquire
- What should a writer do when their publisher goes under? | Forbes
- “No matter what we write, white people can turn our stories into weapons.” Terese Mailhot on telling Native American stories. | Mother Jones
- “I think we need to make them more conventional, maybe just, in a way, not as good.” When real poets write fake poems for movies. | The New York Times
- Poet and scholar Meena Alexander has died at 67. | Indian Express
- “Writers aren’t role models, and novels don’t have to teach us how to live. But that shouldn’t be an excuse for American authors to ignore the big questions.” On Ottessa Moshfegh, Tao Lin, Richard Powers, Octavia Butler, and the need for “future fiction.” | LARB
- Mychal Denzel Smith on James Baldwin and the burden of the black public intellectual. | Harper’s
Also on Lit Hub: What silent film can show us about writing • Read from Extinctions
