TODAY: In 1595, Shakespeare’s Richard II is possibly acted at a private performance at the Canon Row house of Sir Edward Hoby, with Sir Robert Cecil attending. 
  • “It all boils down to this: America values women less than men.” Gillian Flynn on our society’s endemic sexism. | TIME
  • “Good writing and good reading will break down barriers. We may even find a new idea, a great humane vision, around which to rally.” Kazuo Ishiguro calls for cultural and generic diversity in his Nobel lecture. | Nobel Prize
  • Lorin Stein has resigned from his role as the editor of The Paris Review amid an investigation into his inappropriate conduct with female writers and employees. | The New York Times
  • “I am really good at missing deadlines. My secret to this is overcommitting to projects because of a profound inability to say no.” Roxane Gay on how she works. | Lifehacker
  • Emma Cline has filed a countersuit against a former boyfriend who alleged that she had plagiarized his work—and whose lawyer included her private sexual activity in a public court filing, seemingly to shame her into settling. | The New Yorker
  • Truth, Chaos, Violence, Belief: Writers (Margaret Atwood, Roxane Gay), politicians (Hillary Clinton, John McCain), and others reflect on the words that defined 2017. | Medium
  • A series of recent bans and library shutdowns in Egypt have “turned something as simple as reading into a dangerous act.” | The Atlantic
  • Read new work by Ottessa Moshfegh, David Shields, Jamie Quatro and more in VICE’s 11th annual fiction issue. | VICE
  • “As I read her words, I experienced a feeling previously unknown to me: recognition.” On reading (and meeting) Maxine Hong Kingston. | Catapult
  • Eater’s cookbook of the year is Julia Turshen’s Feed the Resistance, which continues a tradition of progressive recipe collections reaching back to the women’s suffrage movement. | Eater
  • “Joanna Newsom was only five years older than me, but she seemed wiser than I’d ever be.” Chelsea Hodson reflects on—and releases—her 13-year-old interview with Joanna Newsom. | Fanzine
  • Intensity, but an attractive tone: On the “public, choral, odic” poetry of Marianne Moore. | Poetry Magazine
  •  “I hope that 40 years from now, gender disparity isn’t so prevalent that I have to be writing about it.” Speaking with Amanda Gorman, the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate. | Broadly
  • Sarah Gailey on Homer’s Sirens, Andersen’s little mermaid, and our pervasive cultural fear of the female voice. | Tor
  • Why it’s time for a sexual harassment reckoning in the publishing industry—and why it hasn’t happened yet. | Bitch Media

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Remembering the great William Gass, his life and his writing advice • Laura Ingalls Wilder and one of the greatest natural disasters in American history: when a trillion locusts ate everything in sight • “If you going to write anything, take it seriously.” In conversation with the legendary Samuel Delany: Parts one and two • Short stories are not quick literary fixes: Brandon Taylor has some issues with the so-called attention economy • Why is a tech start-up hosting poetry readings? And is it working? • Ursula K. Le Guin: who cares about the Great American Novel? • The fight for non-human rights: can an artist’s work bring justice to captive elephants? • Sally Rooney wants to start the revolution: talking to the author of Conversations with Friends about class, care, and more • The downloadable brain: we’re closer to immortality than we think (at least the super-rich are) • Why does everyone hate semicolons? On our love-hate relationship with punctuation

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A Remarkable Dreamlike Fable: Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban • “wonder, passion and gratitude never seem to flag in Sacks’s life”: Nicole Krauss on Oliver Sacks’ final book • “We love apocalypses too much”: a 1964 New York Times review of Saul Bellow’s Herzog • Secrets of the Book Critics: Vox’s Constance Grady on The Handmaid’s TaleLolita, and Portraits of High School Sociopathy • The Marvelous Grotesquerie of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love • In the wake of his passing, a look back at a 1966 review of William Gass’s debut novel • The Best Reviewed Books of the Week, featuring inter-species romance, nuclear Armageddon, Herbert Hoover, jellyfish, and more

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