TODAY: In 1934, Amiri Baraka, seen here at the National Black Political Convention in 1972, is born.
- Gabrielle Bellot considers the darkness at the heart of Jamaica Kincaid’s children’s mystery, Party. | Lit Hub
- Crystal Hana Kim and Laura van den Berg discuss research as a creative act, the limits of first-person narration, and what it means to “learn to write.” | Lit Hub
- “The dead girls are speaking everywhere.” On the endless parade of literary dead girls. | Lit Hub
- “Per Engdahl was a great man, and I’ll maintain that as long as I live.” On the far right past of Ingvar Kamprad, founder of Ikea. | Lit Hub Politics
- “Not going to walk on eggshells anymore.” Minda Honey on finding the freedom to rage her father. | Lit Hub Memoir
- “Every child of immigrants is born into a sense of loss.” On the universal urgency of immigrant literature. | Lit Hub
- “The times, words, and players change; the issues and their urgency do not.” Adele Logan Alexander traces her family’s history from her suffragette grandmothers. | Lit Hub Memoir
- In Nazism, Joseph Roth saw the end of Europe’s cosmopolitan dream. | Lit Hub
- Reading Gaol, the English prison where Oscar Wilde infamously served time for “gross indecency,” has been put up for sale. | BBC
- Erica Wagner writes on four recent books about ghosts and haunted sites, including a collection of Edith Wharton’s ghost stories and Laird Hunt’s novel of witchcraft in colonial New England. | Financial Times
- New adaptations of Jane Austen’s unpublished works are showcasing her “sharp, satirical, and proto-feminist” sides. | The Atlantic
- “These aren’t your traditional book clubs.” Black-led organizations in Boston taking new approaches to connect communities with a love for literature. | The Boston Globe
- “A Doll’s House” once inspired Lupita Nyong’o to break up with her boyfriend. | The New York Times
- “His children grown or in their teens, his job and his reputation secure—Heaney decided to write about happiness.” On the optimism of Seamus Heaney. | The New Yorker
- How to take a literary selfie. | Granta
Also on Lit Hub: America in Mosul: an account of the occupation of an Iraqi city • Who are the Leo DiCaprios of the Booker Prize? Lucia Tang on the perpetually snubbed • Read a story from Jac Jemc’s collection False Bingo.
