TODAY: In 1936, after the decision in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses the book was not obscene, the United Kingdom authorities decide they will not prosecute or seize copies of James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses.
- Ok billionaire: Rebecca Solnit on the unfounded self-importance (and self-pity!) of the richest of the rich. | Lit Hub
- Before wokeness, there was sleep: on stillness as a form of dissent, from Vietnam die-ins to Black Lives Matter to the occupying of public parks. | Lit Hub
- In Trump Nation, a dress rehearsal for a civil war: Larry Siems revisits America, October 2016. | Lit Hub
- “There is a strange and beautiful convergence between the art of Hemingway in general and the art of Unity Temple in particular.” On Frank Lloyd Wright, Ernest Hemingway, and the “art of omission.” | Lit Hub
- “The world is ready for her blend of insane Angela Carter with the originality of Clarice Lispector.” Mariana Enriquez, in praise of Silvina Ocampo. | Lit Hub
- The gay activists who fought the American psychiatric establishment: Mo Rocca on the struggle to depathologize homosexuality. | Lit Hub
- Rosalie Knecht and Idra Novey discuss translation, writing tension, and literary “retrenchment.” | Lit Hub
- Tiffany Midge describes the surreal absurdity of preparing for her mother’s death, “laughing until our bellies ached, spitting death right in the eye.” | Lit Hub
- Loving Anna Karenina, hating Madame Bovary, and more rapid-fire book recs from Esmé Weijun Wang. | Book Marks
- Kirstin Innes delivers an ode to Laura Lee, “escort, sex workers’ rights campaigner, single mother, law student, and ferocious, hilarious political powerhouse.” | CrimeReads
- Appreciating Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life, the “compelling but unwieldy” book that eluded the Russian canon. | The Atlantic
- Giulia Pines spent $1,395 for a workshop in Provence with literary grifter Anna March—and doesn’t regret it for a second. | Vox
- Novelist Ernest Gaines, whose books include A Lesson Before Dying and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, died Tuesday at 86. | The Advocate
- The Paris Review is giving Richard Ford—who famously spit on Colson Whitehead after Whitehead gave him a negative review—a lifetime achievement award, and people are not thrilled. | The Guardian
- Revisiting the fiction of Juan Carlos Onetti, the 20th-century Uruguayan writer who, though beloved, depicted his country as a “place marked by pettiness, idiocy and squalor.” | The New York Times
- “Reading Ruskin, you begin to think that he more or less lived at the tip of his pencil, in the nib of his pen”: Verlyn Klinkenborg on the 19th-century polymath par excellence John Ruskin. | New York Review Daily
Also on Lit Hub: What was it like to bake the royal wedding cake? • Mimi Lok on writing in (and for) the margins • Read an excerpt from Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker Prize-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other.
