TODAY: In 1926, writer and historian Jan Morris is born.
- “The narrator of ‘Sleep’ was the first woman in fiction I could truly recognize as a person.” Mieko Kawakami on the women characters of Haruki Murakami. | Lit Hub
- Language-as-medium: On Virginia Woolf, Anne Carson, and the use of form to investigate truth and death. | Lit Hub
- “The air is literally unbreathable, pestilential.” Jean-Baptist del Amo details the daily horrors of a factory farm. | Lit Hub
- In which we learn the seeds of the Trump Empire (one of Fred Trump’s early projects) were sown on the site of a former Ringling Bros. campground. Where clowns once lived. | Lit Hub
- Can fiction teach AI to feel? (And do we want it to?) | Lit Hub
- Letters from a young artist trying to make it in New York: when Jerome Robbins, dance icon, could barely land an audition. | Lit Hub
- “The great concerns of our time all boil down to the condition of the soil.” Isabella Tree on the destruction of soil and the value of rewilding the land. | Lit Hub
- “Columbine.” A poem by Javier Zamora from the new issue of Freeman’s. | Lit Hub
- Sarah Weinman recounts how Mary Roberts Rinehart, queen of American crime fiction, barely survived a murder mystery of her own. | CrimeReads
- Patricia Lockwood on John Updike as malfunctioning sex robot, Jonathan Lethem on Edward Snowden’s self-portrait, and more of the Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
- “I’ll never forget my best friend’s father ranting about “entitlements” as he walked out the door on his way to pick up an unemployment check.” Amy Brady on the Topeka of her childhood (and of Ben Lerner’s new novel). | Slate
- “Taste and tact had departed hand in hand; I had been reading too much John Hoyer Updike.” Here is the Patricia Lockwood on John Updike you never knew you always needed. | London Review of Books
- From NYRB Classics to the Chicago Quarterly Review, here are four literary anniversaries worthy of celebration this year. | The Washington Post
- Are we living in a simulation? Are you a simulation? Is this newsletter a simulation? | The Paris Review
- On Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise and what it means to honestly represent sexual assault in fiction. | The Nation
- We’re getting a semi-autobiographical novel next year from Jim Carrey called Memoirs and Misinformation. | ABC News
- Carmen Maria Machado shares her recipe for “You-Are-Ten-and-Tender-and-Can-Only-Make-This-One-Thing and Cheese.” | Refinery29
Also on Lit Hub: The best of the university press: recommendations for smarter reading • Anne-Christine d’Adesky talks to Otosirieze Obi-Young, deputy editor of Brittle Paper • Read an excerpt from László Krasznahorkai’s newly-translated novel Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (trans. Ottilie Muzlet).
