TODAY: In 1907, Northern Irish poet Louis MacNeice is born.
- “We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation.” When Faber & Faber’s T.S. Eliot passed on George Orwell (and more). | Lit Hub
- “No harm if true; but, in fact, not true.” A brief history of mostly terrible campaign biographies. | Lit Hub Politics
- “Being black feels so absurd a lot of the time.” Rion Amilcar Scott and Danielle Evans discuss long-term revision, the risks of satire, and the “multiplicity of blackness.” | Lit Hub
- Dogs can feel a range of emotions we recognize, from depression to excitement. So why don’t we listen to them? | Lit Hub Science
- “Topical but also timeless.” Michael Scammell on the eerily prescient lessons of Darkness at Noon. | Lit Hub
- NSFW (if you’re a cop): When D.H. Lawrence’s “unlovely” paintings were confiscated by Scotland Yard. | Lit Hub
- On the immeasurable influence of Fadhil al-Azzawi, the Iraqi writer who modernized poetic forms. | Lit Hub
- Jia Tolentino on Margaret Atwood’s exploration of complicity in Gilead, Laura Miller on Stephen King’s most terrifying monsters, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
- A book deal gone off the rails, a disenchanted BFF, and a shattered friendship: The wild story of Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway, as told by her former ghostwriter Natalie Beach. | The Cut
- The diary of Renia Spiegel, who was killed by Nazis in 1942 and referred to by some as the “Polish Anne Frank,” will be published by her family after sitting in a bank vault for decades. | BBC
- Rivka Galchen on her lifelong love for children’s books in translation, with their “added aura of adventure, even a sense of the hidden being revealed.” | Publishers Weekly
- Once a forum for “the cultivators of the most forward-looking expressions of language,” now a “cauldron of explanatory excess and raw prejudice”—what happened to Urban Dictionary? | WIRED
- Tim Parks considers the state of translation—and of our times. | NYRB
- “She was a reader, in the fiercest sense.” Ruth Reichl remembers her editor, Susan Kamil. | The New York Times
- Author Catherynne Valente started a petition asking Amazon to remove the horrifying (and horrifyingly-titled) fundamentalist parenting book To Train Up A Child. | Fatherly
Also on Lit Hub: Hazel V. Carby’s tangled histories of family and empire, England and Jamaica • On the woman who beat the Nazis in Europe’s deadliest horse race • Read an excerpt of Amitav Ghosh’s new novel Gun Island.
