Literary Hub

TODAY: In 2006, Egyptian writer and Nobel Prize laureate Naguib Mahfouz dies.

Polly Atkin on nature writing, chronic illness, and the controversy surrounding Raynor Winn’s memoir, The Salt Path. | Lit Hub Memoir
Richard Siken talks to Poets.org about his new collection, I Do Know Some Things, and the line break as “the most fundamental poetic device.” | Lit Hub In Conversation
“When I first arrived in Belfast, I saw both Palestinian and Israeli flags, but in different neighborhoods—the Palestinian ones in Irish nationalist areas, and Israeli ones in Protestant loyalist areas.” On Northern Irish solidarity with Palestine. | Lit Hub Politics
How Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies influenced Sheila Heti to write (and live) sincerely. | Lit Hub Criticism
“I think it’s important to remember how important Black women were to him.” Kaitlyn Greenidge talks to Nicholas Boggs and Jessica B. Harris about James Baldwin’s lovers and friends. | Harper’s Bazaar
Jon Allsop proposes the Moomins as “an antidote to the toxicity of much modern internet discourse.” | The New Yorker
H.M.A. Leow explores how Western travel writing doubled as propaganda during the Second Sino-Japanese War. | JSTOR Daily
Sloan Crosley dives into the bewildering world of celebrity children’s books. | The New Yorker
“Alice survived in and because of poetry. That, and love.” Nick Sturm remembers Alice Notley. | Poetry
Is the literary industrial complex worth the cash? On the scam of ‘luxury’ writing retreats. | Slate
On Betar, Canary Mission, and the practice of doxxing students and faculty who engage in pro-Palestine actions on university campuses. | The Baffler
“There is a kind of Lockwood lens that brings into focus the improbable and hilariously bizarre features lurking in the midst of ordinary life, which a different writer might prefer to smooth over for realism’s sake.” Alexandra Schwartz profiles Patricia Lockwood. | The New Yorker
Jonathan Karp is stepping down as the C.E.O. of Simon & Schuster. | The New York Times
“To remember is to risk punishment”: Sajad Hameed and Rehan Qayoom Mir report on India’s book ban in Kashmir. | Jacobin
Ahmad Almallah on the poetics of Palestine, American hypocrisy, and writing “between linguistic borderlands.” | Asymptote
“I’ve since come to think of guilty pleasure only when I think about terrible beauty.” On the entwining legacies of climate change and family history in California. | Nautilus
“It’s an atrocity recorded live”: Aymann Ismail on the 189 Palestinian journalists that Israel has killed. | Slate
Joanna Pocock explores America by Greyhound, and considers the “overlooked ecosystem” that includes the buses. | Orion
Nicholas Quah explores the impossibility of a podcast canon: “The medium is just two decades old, yet whole swaths of its history have already been lost: feeds taken offline, platforms shuttered, files no longer hosted.” | Vulture