TODAY: In 1909, Franz Kafka’s short story “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” is published in the Prague newspaper Bohemia.
- “I don’t think that I have to justify conducting research through the medium of Welsh… in Wales.” On Bedwyr Ab Ion Thomas’s mission to reach one million Welsh speakers. | Lit Hub
- Fall 2020: Beautiful and compelling but make it… dark. The best book covers of September. | Lit Hub
- “Each candidate is a chance to defeat the cynical politics of voter suppression.” John Freeman on the power of participatory democracy. | Lit Hub Politics
- “I don’t see this way of living going away. Hunting and fishing—I believe in it.” Blaine Wilson (Tsartlip First Nation) on life under one of the oldest treaties in North America. | Lit Hub History
- “What if we thought of Michael Jackson’s addiction to plastic surgery not as self-loathing body modification, but as a form of artistic practice?” Namwali Serpell on our endless fascination with faces. | Lit Hub Science
- “The minute you treat one of your past selves as finished, it will rebel.” Rakesh Satyal and Rufus Wainwright in conversation. | BOMB
- “Indifference to life seems to matter when using a weapon, but not so much when using the much vaster powers of the state as a weapon.” Louisvillian ZZ Packer on the Breonna Taylor decision, and Daniel Cameron’s sins of omission. | The New Yorker
- “They promised us—through the creative writers who taught the creative writers who taught us—that our own little stories are enough. They insisted that you and I do a kind of civic good by simply giving witness to our immediate experiences.” Eric Bennett on how America taught the world to write small. | Chronicle of Higher Education
- Looking for prestige in the literary world? That MFA may do you some good. | The Economist
- Amid political turmoil in Belarus, Svetlana Alexievich has temporarily left the country for medical treatment in Germany. | The Moscow Times
- The American Library Association’s list of most challenged books is “a distressing sign of how the culture war has shifted.” | Washington Post
- Feeling hopeless about the state of—well, everything? These books could reaffirm your faith in humanity. | The Guardian
