- “When you are a small-town librarian, you say ‘yes’ to everything.” How some libraries are stepping in to fill the void left by vanishing local news outlets. | The Atlantic
- “Nothing destroys a family like an inheritance.” Alexander Chee on the link between money and pain and the inheritance he received after his father’s death at 43. | BuzzFeed Reader
- “I have already formed the impression that my father is an excellent doctor. Though he will, in other ways, disappoint, disillusion, or unfavorably surprise me in the coming decades, this impression will stand.” Michael Chabon on his father’s secret superpower—and his own. | The New Yorker
- One year in, Jim Shepard, Rion Amilcar Scott, Joan Silber and 19 other writers imagine how this administration might end. | Scoundrel Time
- “To me she is one of the 20th-century writers most vitally, joyfully, seriously philosophically, aesthetically, and politically engaged with the living materials of history, and with her own time.” Ali Smith on Muriel Spark at 100. | The Guardian
- “Romance reminds us that women want, and it celebrates this fact. How sad that that’s subversive, but it is.” Jamie Green on the politics of the romance novel and the genre’s response to Trump. | BuzzFeed
- What makes a perfect subway read? According to Adam Sternbergh, it should feel “like the hypodermic needle that gets jabbed through Uma Thurman’s breastplate in Pulp Fiction.” | The New York Times
- “There are vacation photos and family photos; landscapes and photos of pets; clippings from newspapers and magazines; and, of course, the garden.” Harvard has digitized a photo album of Virginia Woolf’s. | Open Culture
- “Four very thin trees stand above their own reflections and hesitate, as cold girls do. She thinks of rhymes for girls do. Whirls through. Pearls anew.” Read a new short story by Anne Carson. | Brick
- “I think it’s hard now, after a whole generation or even two has been influenced by Carver. . . to understand how different What We Talk About When We Talk About Love felt when it was first published.“ Brian Evenson on Raymond Carver. | Fanzine
- “What had happened to the writer I’d been? She had self-destructed. She was gone.” Alyssa Knickerbocker on writing, motherhood, and the X-Men. | Tin House
- The National Book Foundation has announced a new prize recognizing international works in translation. | National Book Foundation
- “It is not possible to exist in this feeling all the time. This is not one of our capabilities—but look, the body says, lifting up into its improbable upper air, look, I’m doing it. Here is my world, for just one minute.” Patricia Lockwood on the beauty and brilliance of figure skater Jason Brown. | New York Times Magazine
- The Freedom of the Press foundation has launched an initiative to preserve publications whose archives are under threat from wealthy buyers, starting with Gawker and L.A. Weekly. | Freedom of the Press Foundation
- “At some point, they caught me looking and I turned away, embarrassed to have glimpsed something so painful and intimate.” Tayari Jones on the overheard conversation that inspired her new novel. | Sydney Morning Herald
From Octavia Butler to Stephen King, 13 writers who grew to hate their own books • Emma Glass: How the intensity of nursing led me back to my calling as a writer • Bearing witness to a nation in search of itself: love and wonder in post-Communist Poland • How the very oldest of the old helped me figure out what happiness is: John Leland on his year among the 85-and-up crowd • Jojo Moyes: What is the thing that makes me most happy? • We need to talk about the fantasy of the writer’s life: Rosalie Knecht on the postwar aesthetic of glamorous decay that haunts us all still • T.J. Stiles: How do you explain this national tragedy? This moment of Trump? (You start by looking back at 400 years of genocide, expulsion, imprisonment, and opportunistic tribalism) • On our obsession with lost and mysterious books, and how they often disappoint • A room (and writer) for every letter: visiting a Parisian literary hotel • 16 books you should read this February • “For concentration, you need a cat. Do you happen to have a cat?” And other pieces of indispensable advice from the great Muriel Spark • When hipsters get old: on the end of Portlandia • On the anniversary of Ulysses, 21 famous writers weigh in, for and against; more crucially, here are the 50 best Amazon one-star reviews of Ulysses
On Book Marks:
From 1962, Robert Frost, JFK, and the Lengthening Reaches of Eternity • Fighting With Shadows: Anne Enright on Martin Amis • This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Marion Winik on Portnoy’s Complaint, Mrs. Caliban, and Goodreads Diehards • Garbage, Genius, or Both?: 3 ways of looking at Infinite Jest • To celebrate the National Book Foundation’s new award for translated literature, we look back on the year’s 10 Best Reviewed Books in Translation • Monsters in Baghdad, coffee in Yemen, and Knausgaard in the snow all feature among our Best Reviewed Books of the Week
