TODAY: In 1986, Simone de Beauvoir died; in 1929, she played a shooting game with Jean-Paul Sartre at a fairground in Paris.
- “The history of the border is a history of imagination. It’s a matter of who has the power to impose their imagination on the other.” From Julie Chinitz’s narrative history of US immigration (Part 1) | Literary Hub
- Günter Grass, novelist, social critic, and Nobel prize laureate, died yesterday at age 87. “Every time I think about the future, my knowledge of the past and the present are there, affecting what I call future. And sentences that were said yesterday may not really be past and done with—perhaps they will have a future. Mentally, we are not restricted to chronology—we are aware of many different times at once, as if they were one.” – The Paris Review, Art of Fiction 124. | NPR, The Paris Review
- Eduardo Galeano, author and prominent leftist intellectual, died yesterday at age 74. “To publish Eduardo Galeano is to publish the enemy: the enemy of lies, indifference, above all of forgetfulness.” | The Guardian, Democracy Now!
- “Berlant is a laureate of genre, which is to say that Berlant pays attention to what critical theory is made of.” Genre, femininity, and literary criticism. | The LA Review of Books
- “What do you do with your mixed feelings toward a text that treats as stage furniture the most grievous and unhealed insult in American history—especially when you belong to the insulted group?” Elif Batuman asks if we can overlook racism in, and still enjoy, outmoded texts. | The New Yorker
- And on the racist roots of the horror genre: “The ‘unknown’ in [H.P. Lovecraft’s] stories isn’t really so much unknown as it is rooted in very particular and specific fears of racialized and sexualized others.” | The New Inquiry
- The ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom released its annual “Top Ten List of Frequently Challenged Books,” based on reports of community members’ Orwellian attempts to have literature removed from libraries and school curricula. | LA Times
- “My dad moved to Atlanta twenty-nine years ago with one suitcase, and began to name the new things he saw, and press himself into this life, and a world sprang up around him.” On using language to create a home. | Granta
- “[Eleanor Marx] went on to endure many hardships, none of them bourgeois.” A new biography relates the struggles and successes of Karl Marx’s favorite daughter. | Bookforum
- “You go home to study Greek or Latin and all you can think about is how goddamn insufferable your presence must be for other people.” How to tell if you’re in a J.D. Salinger story. | The Toast
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