TODAY: In 1860, Charles Dickens burns most of his private papers at his country home in Kent, Gad’s Hill Place. Here, Dickens can be seen lying on the grass in the light-colored suit, front right, surrounded by friends and family.
- “When I was a teenager, I would ask my father every year if I could finally read The Magic Mountain.” Jenny Erpenbeck, a totally normal teenager, on Thomas Mann. | Lit Hub
- What are we going to do about voter suppression? An important conversation with Stacey Abrams, Kevin M. Kruse, Jim Downs, Carol Anderson, Heather Ann Thompson, and Heather Cox Richardson. | Lit Hub Politics
- “The police helped guide Armstrong through the crowd of thousands of people—including five bands—but many in the crowd did not emerge unscathed.” On Louis Armstrong’s first tour of the south. | Lit Hub History
- What awaits muses who “outlive” their usefulness? Annalena McAfee on the women who got away. | Lit Hub Art
- “Our Spanish is weird, slanted, full of idiosyncrasies and its own insistent melodic twists.” Carolina De Robertis on translating her own novel. | Lit Hub Translation
- Joshua Bennett on the fullness of Black life in a time of siege: the author of Being Property Once Myself talks to Jesse McCarthy about BLM, Black comedy, teaching and more. | Lit Hub Politics
- What are Americans reading most during the pandemic? Books about race, romance novels, and Hilary Mantel. | The Washington Post
- “Being asked to write about Kafka is like being asked to describe the Great Wall of China by someone who’s standing just next to it. The only honest thing to do is point.” Joshua Cohen points at Franz Kafka. | The Paris Review
- “I realized just how subtly radical it was of Weiner to insist on giving every single one of her fat heroines a happy ending, book after book after book.” On the grounding power of Jennifer Weiner’s body positive novels. | Vogue
- A trip to Canmore, the small Canadian mountain town that boasts between 60 and 100 authors as residents. | CBC
- The people who adapted Game of Thrones for HBO have their next literary adaptation lined up for Netflix: Liu Cixin’s sci-fi trilogy, The Three-Body Problem. | CNN
- “Philosophy will benefit as much from being out in a community as the community will benefit from the types of thinking that philosophy affords.” Regan Penaluna talks to Briana Toole about race, privilege, and the field of philosophy. | Guernica
- Mitchell S. Jackson on names as a means for reinvention and self-assertion. | The Believer
Also on Lit Hub: Read from two new novels, Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill, and Asha Lemmie’s Fifty Words For Rain · David Wills on the time Hunter S. Thompson ran for sheriff.
