TODAY: In 1899, French actress Sarah Bernhardt premières an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with herself in the title role at the Paris theatre where she took over management and renamed the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt.
- “He had worked for the wrong magazine. That was all.” A short story by Nell Zink. | Harper’s Magazine
- “The war you lived through is long gone, but its ricochets have become taxidermy, enclosed by your own familiar flesh.” A letter from Ocean Vuong to his mother. | The New Yorker
- From the New York Times Magazine’s Health issue, Joyce Carol Oates, Karen Russell, Junot Díaz, and Mohsin Hamid on roosters, hermit crabs, mongooses, and black kites. | The New York Times Magazine
- Brain-damaged by love and exhaustion, I could not make sense of any other kind of book: Emily Gould on her postpartum addiction to parenting books. | Longreads
- In which Catie Disabato explores the new canon of pop star novels. | Full Stop
- As the library has grown from a roomful of young Nairobians to an ongoing conversation that spans the continent . . . it’s become clear that Jalada is where the future of African literature is being written.” Aaron Bady on the Jalada literary collective. | Pacific Standard
- I’ve always understood the world through writing, but arriving at that understanding is a long and indirect process of grasping for the right language: An interview with Jessie Chaffee. | The Rumpus
- Laura Kipnis and HarperCollins have been named in a defamation lawsuit filed by a Northwestern graduate student whose case featured prominently in Kipnis’s book Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus. | Jezebel
- Get Out director Jordan Peele will adapt Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel Lovecraft Country into a TV series for HBO. | Deadline
- They want feelings, not facts, you know this by now: Porochista Khakpour on writing Iranian-America. | Catapult
- Though Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac is considered an American classic, the sayings within “were not American, and for the most part Franklin didn’t write them.” | The Awl
- Maybe I’m just used to rawness: An interview with Gabrielle Bell. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- “How on earth had this gone from a famous asylum to a home for books?” Rowan Hisayo Buchanan visits an insane asylum-turned-library. | The Paris Review
- She gifts us words that we may have difficulty finding for ourselves: on the urgency and timeliness of Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life. | The New Inquiry
- Casting “two sets of girls in 8- and 15-year-old iterations, and then a large Annie-esque supporting cast of hard-knock lifers” for the television adaptation of the Neapolitan Novels. | The New York Times
Introducing Lit Hub Longform: Michael Chabon roams the West Bank with Sam Bahour · On the canonization of Dylan Thomas and the legacy of literary afterlives · Sometimes a book is the right book for some kind of feeling: Reading Joan Didion in the midst of depression · Why “write what you know” is not good writing advice · The price tag of being a woman: How Rachel Cusk, Joanna Walsh & others depict the demands of femininity · Discussing first-person LGBTQ narratives with Garth Greenwell, Martin Pousson, and others · What’s so bad about being bored at work? Mary Mann looks at life at the office in a whole different way · This novel was written for Ugandans: Aaron Bady on Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu · 8 worthy literary heirs to W. G. Sebald, from Teju Cole to Ben Lerner · Ada Calhoun on the horrors of getting it wrong in print
The Best of Book Marks:
Yakov endures: From 1966, the New York Times on Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer · Cory Doctorow’s utopian/dystopian novel Walkway is “like a Michael Bay movie if all the explosions were emotional” · The riveting psychic vomiting of Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick · Joyce Carol Oates on Breece D’J Pancake, the troubled West Virginia writer whose suicide preceded his only published collection · The wonderful sordidness of Claire Dederer’s sexually charged memoir, Love and Trouble · J.G. Ballard and the “excess of fantasy” that killed America · Tessa Hadley, China Miéville, JFK, Ernest Hemingway, and more: This week’s best-teviewed books
