TODAY: In 1818, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is published anonymously in an edition of just 500 copies by the small London publishing house Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones.
- “Beware the danger of what I call Feminism Lite.” A profile of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and excerpt from her forthcoming book, Dear Ijeawele. | The Guardian
- “A great writer mimicking, on the page, the dynamic energy of human thought is about as close as we can get to modelling pure empathy.” George Saunders on the writing of Grace Paley. | The New Yorker
- “Somebody’s truth is always someone else’s lie. What matters more is how history speaks to the present.” An interview with Chris Kraus. | SSENSE
- This was highly irregular: An excerpt from Lincoln in the Bardo (and audiobook excerpt, ft. Nick Offerman, David Sedaris and George Saunders.) | Times Literary Supplement
- A profile of Rebecca Solnit, a “master of exposing the malevolent underbelly of everyday situations.” | ELLE
- Why write the inverse of a novel that was published 12 years earlier? On Domenico Starnone’s Ties, which “feels like a deliberate counterpoint” to Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment. | The Week
- Read Alexander Chee on Rufus Wainwright, Angela Flournoy on Solange, and Margo Jefferson on Cécile McLorin Salvant (among many others) in the New York Times Magazine’s annual music issue. | NYT Mag
- The finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award have been announced: Viet Dinh, Louise Erdrich, Garth Greenwell, Imbolo Mbue, and Sunil Yapa. | The Washington Post
- The 2017 National Book Award judges, including Jacqueline Woodson, Jeff Chang, and Gregory Pardlo, have been announced. | National Book Foundation
- Larissa Pham on Eve’s Hollywood, which “feels like one very long brunch conversation with your glamorous older cousin the afternoon following a party she snuck you into.” | The Paris Review
- Nothing breaks the spell cast by James Baldwin: Darryl Pinckney on Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro. | The New York Review of Books
- Kerry Washington will produce an adaptation of Brit Bennet’s debut novel The Mothers with Warner Bros. | The Hollywood Reporter
- “Perhaps, we as scholars and writers, will be more conscious of how we reproduce systems of power, privilege, and oppression and we will work to subvert these systems in our work.” An interview with Marisa J. Fuentes and an excerpt from her book Dispossessed Lives. | Full Stop
- Amiable White Teeth, the newly discovered novel by Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay, is “is a master key to the intersection of race and global revolutionary politics.” | The Atlantic
- To continue expanding your to be read pile post-International Women’s Day: Recommendations of 33 international writers who are “bold for change” and ten brilliant poet-translator pairings. | Words Without Borders, Modern Poetry in Translation
- An update on the 32-part television series based on the Neapolitan novels, which references both Adam Driver and The Young Pope. | The New York Times
Rebecca Solnit on the ways in which women have been silenced and found their voices · Alice Neel’s artist’s life: on the career of an American great · A short story by Bandi, smuggled out of North Korea · On the adolescent charm of bad celebrity poetry · Margaret Atwood on what it’s like to watch her own dystopia come true · Finding a room of one’s own on the women-only Mexico City metro · In conversation with Sharon Olds, America’s brave poet of the body · Jhumpa Lahiri on her compulsion to translate Domenico Starnone · Why Sinclair Lewis’ legacy deserves a reevaluation beyond It Can’t Happen Here · From Didion to Batuman to Glück 14 books to read this March
