TODAY: In 1919, Doris Lessing is born.
- Our end-of-decade accounting continues with the best memoirs of the 2010s. Like life, this involved some hard choices. | Lit Hub
- David Ulin on the countercultural influence of Peanuts, and Linus, “boy philosopher, wise beyond his years.” | Lit Hub
- “Darkness and strangeness abound in children’s literature, as they should. Anything else would be a lie.” Cara Hoffman gets real about kid lit (and talking mice). | Lit Hub
- Houdini’s greatest escape was from fraud charges in Germany, and the trial was predictably sensational. | Lit Hub Biography
- “To the end she was both restless and routinized, selfish and generous, straightforward and elliptical.” On the gloriously understated career of Elaine Stritch. | Lit Hub Biography
- “You have to learn how your body speaks.” A day in the life of a lion tracker. | Lit Hub Science
- Dead Kennedys in the West: How the San Francisco punk scene of the 1970s got political. | Lit Hub Music
- Things We Didn’t Talk about When I Was a Girl author Jeannie Vanasco recommends five great nonfiction books with metanarratives. | Book Marks
- “Bright lights cast the darkest shadows.” Erica Wright searches for the most glamorous women characters in crime fiction, and questions the meaning of the femme fatale. | CrimeReads
- “I only represent myself. Nobody should represent a country.” Yiyun Li on why she’s “not ready” to engage with readers in China. | The Nation
- Liana Finck on Ogden Whitney’s female characters, who “live to find love.” | The Paris Review
- Who says poetry doesn’t pay? A woman in Los Angeles paid part of a DMV fine with a copy of her recent poetry collection. | Los Angeles Times
- Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk will open a foundation in Wroclaw, Poland to aid authors and translators. | The First News
- Audible UK has partnered with Uber to offer passengers several free in-app short stories as alternatives to “stressful” news headlines. | The Bookseller
- In a new book, Ben Crump, the Florida lawyer who represented the families of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, asks how American laws and policing practices have enabled “legalized genocide.” | The Philadelphia Inquirer
- “I got a lot of mail of people saying, ‘Why doesn’t he eat the peach?’” André Aciman on insecurity, sex scenes, and Find Me. | Time
Also on Lit Hub: Remembering Kate Braverman’s Los Angeles • Alejandro Zambra on one of the great diarists of the 20th century, Julio Ramon Ribeyro • Read a story from Hebe Uhart’s collection The Scent of Buenos Aires (trans. Maureen Shaughnessy).
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