Literary Hub

TODAY: In 1933, the first issue of Esquire is published, featuring writing by Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Dashiell Hammett, Bobby Jones, and Gene Tunney.

“Laying someone to rest is the final act of care that leaves a lingering impression, not only on the dead, but on you.” Eden Royce on the importance of funerary details in the face of grief. | Lit Hub Memoir
Kate Colby on drawing inspiration from Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod Morning and how poetry can save the human brain. | Lit Hub Art
Emily J. Orlando explores Taylor Swift’s Pre-Raphaelite era: “Swift seems to be identifying with, and forcefully reimagining, this tragic figure from Victorian history.” | Lit Hub Criticism
“I do not think love comes easily to me—love for people, that is. For cats, who have been accused of loving back too little or not at all, it is a different story.” Rebecca van Laer on what humans can learn from our relationships with cats. | Lit Hub Memoir
Tajja Isen considers publishing’s gambling problem: “There is tremendous pressure to succeed from the beginning. If they fail, all bets are off, sometimes literally.” | The Walrus
“Reading them in the bright quiet of morning, with an attentive child, feels like childhood itself.” Nausicaa Renner on the children’s series Sato the Rabbit. | The New Yorker
Arthur C. Clarke, scuba diver? On the author’s overlooked underseas adventures. | JSTOR Daily
Andrea Bartz details her lawsuit against A.I. company Anthropic, “an opening gambit in a critical battle that will be waged for years to come.” | The New York Times
Three newly unearthed Virginia Woolf stories will be published for the first time next month. | The Guardian
“We humans are imperfect and imperfectable, but sometimes it is those imperfections that are our greatest asset, particularly if we are capable of recognizing those imperfections.” John Warner on A.I. and “bullshit writing.” | The Biblioracle Recommends
“The people working on this stuff don’t even seem to believe their own bullshit.” Why AI will never serve democracy. | The Baffler
Patricia Lockwood and Emmeline Clein talk about writing in the attic, literary tropes, and Jesus’s vagina-shaped wound. | Cultured
Jane Stern breaks down the language of apartments. | The Paris Review
“There is no medical training for this, no papers to help guide me – nor should there be.” Mina Naguib documents the impossible choices of providing medical care in Gaza. | Granta
Jessiva Olin explores the Amanda Knox media-industrial complex. | London Review of Books
What does prestige even mean now when it comes to television? “Flash forward 10 years. The bubble has burst…” | Public Books
“The postcolonial future would, more often than not, be ruled by Mobutus, not Lumumbas.” Sandipto Dasgupta on the life and work of “anticolonialist luminary” Andrée Blouin. | Boston Review
Ashley Stimpson on the beauty and resilience of swamplands, and the importance of protecting them. | Longreads
“This AI slop is just harvesting the remnants of legacy journalism, insulting the legacies of the dead and intellectually impoverishing the rest of us.” When AI-generated biographies capitalize on death and grief. | 404 Media