TODAY: In 1919, the last issue of the pulp magazine The Thrill Book, oriented towards the fantasy genre or science fiction, is published.
- “The tricky thing about hope is to not confuse it with optimism.” Rebecca Solnit on black swans, slim chances, and the 2020 presidential election. | Lit Hub Politics
- Forget the polls, here is every Mr. Darcy ranked. (You’ll never* guess who comes out on top. (*You might.)) | Lit Hub
- From Napoleon to Trump, Liesl Schillinger on the tyrant as troll. | Lit Hub History
- What happens when literary events move online? A look at the book world’s new digital reality. | Lit Hub
- I’ll see you in Frankfurt: on missing just about everything to do with the biggest bookish gathering in the world. | Lit Hub
- “The end goal of lying as a way of life is not that the lies are believed, but the cementing of cynicism.” Roger Berkowitz on Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and how might ever exist again in a shared reality. | Lit Hub Politics
- “He gets in his car. He turns the ignition. It is at 7:17 pm that the explosive device detonates.” Magda Montiel Davis on the anticommunist Cuban exiles who struck terror in Miami. | Lit Hub History
- “In the farthest, most northern places, we can still make a stand against climate change.” Rick Bass on saving America’s forest arks. | Lit Hub Climate Change
- “When death came, I was to let it be, you were to die when you died.” A letter from Dorothy Gallagher to her late husband Ben Sonnenberg. | Lit Hub Memoir
- “I’ve been thinking about how we might get better at containing, packaging, explaining what it has been like, what it is like, to have the world act upon our specific female bodies. What it is like to spend so much time holding tight to feelings no one wants to hear or see.” Lynn Steger Strong on slow violence. | The Paris Review
- Franny Choi on watching Battlestar Galactica “to see what it had to say about me, and about us; about ‘now,’ and about ‘ever.'” | The Rumpus
- What is travel writing without traveling? Jason Wilson on what the pandemic has meant for his career. | The Washington Post
- “There was still a sense of occasion: film was a set of limited exposures, each one valuable, requiring an outlay of time and money.” Emma Cline on the selfies of Mike Mandel. | The New Yorker
- At the digital Frankfurt Book Fair, David Grossman called on writers to bear witness to the results of the pandemic. “Most writers and poets I know—including myself—are embarrassingly clumsy when it comes to engaging with reality,” he said. “But we do know how to observe it.” | The Guardian
- A spotlight on Indigenous Canadian authors at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair. | Deutsche Welle
- Amnesty International and Angelina Jolie are partnering to write a book for young adults that highlights the tenets of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. | Amnesty
