- “They were like the left and right hands of a pianist. Didion supplied delicate melody, while Dunne surged on with mighty supporting chords.” Susan Braudy recalls interviewing Joan Didion in 1977. | Jezebel
- Fully entering into a different language involves a total upending of the self: Three translators weigh on what Arrival gets right (and wrong) about language learning. | Words Without Borders
- “How did three such relatively sheltered women, the daughters of a priest living in rural Yorkshire, write some of the most passionate and proto-feminist novels of the 19th century?” On Sally Wainwright’s dramatization of the lives of the Brontë sisters. | The Atlantic
- Belle Boggs and Mike Scalise discuss finding a way to love again after a book project has been shelved, the gendered perceptions of illness (and illness memoirs), and rereading old writing. | BOMB Magazine
- On the politically infused and often censored canon of Russian novels and Lenin’s literary leanings. | The Guardian
- Ben Lerner on Australian writer Gerald Murnane, a fellow poet-philosopher of the plains. | The New Yorker
- People will always want to both write and read about love: On A Separation and the evolution of the marriage plot. | The New Republic
- The 10th annual Best Translated Book Awards longlist has been announced. | Three Percent
- A blowjob is a blowjob is a blowjob: on the difficulty of representing fellatio in literature. | Broadly
- She had dreamed of holding one of her father’s guns for so many years that it was as if she were dreaming now: an excerpt from Hannah Tinti’s The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley. | BuzzFeed Reader
- “I didn’t want to blur the frontier between fiction and truth, I wanted to write all about truth.” An interview with French literary sensation Édouard Louis. | Work in Progress
- Christian Lorentzen on the many lives of Angela Carter, whose “literary taste cut against the English tendency toward middlebrow anti-intellectualism.” | Vulture
- “The reader gets some beauty from the book in exchange for some darkness that grows in his mind.” An interview with Samanta Schweblin. | Full Stop
- This is what we can do—writing these stories that remind them that they are wanted, they are necessary, that they matter, and that they’re loved.” Jennifer Niven and Nicola Yoon discuss the responsibilities that YA authors have to their readers. | MTV News
- Patti Smith has purchased the reconstructed home of beloved French poet Arthur Rimbaud. | Architectural Digest
Also on Lit Hub:
On The Idiot, the evolution of the campus novel, and the implications of setting a book at Harvard · What John Berger taught Elena Passarello about looking at surgically altered goats · Why literature and pop culture still can’t get the Midwest right · Dionne Ford on slavery, immigration, and explaining the difference to her neighbors · When literary plots get mysterious: On recent novels by Katie Kitamura, Patty Yumi Cottrell, and more · On the vehement feminist reaction to “No. 1 Lash Lady” Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman · We’ll call it “The Wall of Shame”: Juan Pablo Villalobos volunteers to build Trump’s wall · A profile of tireless literary translator Megan McDowell, who has had 8 books published in the past 2 years · Julio Cortázar teaches a class on his own short story · Life advice from Adrienne Rich
