TODAY: In 1778, Voltaire returns to Paris after 28 years of exile.
- Rebecca Solnit on mysterious pregnancies,
disappearing men, and the baffling language of the CDC. | Literary Hub - A. O. Scott asks himself: what is criticism? | Literary Hub
- A bikini, a toothbrush, and 44 issues of The New Yorker: Summer Brennan attempts to catch up on a year’s reading. | Literary Hub
- Nothing is as vain and self-regarding as the law: Lorrie Moore on the “immersive and vérité” docuseries Making A Murderer. | NYRB
- “By shutting the door to the refugees, Europe is shutting the lid on its own satin-padded coffin.” Aleksandar Hemon on the cost of dehumanizing refugees. | Rolling Stone
- White liberals and the still-standing civil rights movement: A 23-year-old Alice Walker’s first published (and award-winning) essay. | The American Scholar
- Aaron Sorkin is making a stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, “which is, of course, the story of an older man explaining liberal values to a young woman.” | Vulture
- “All subjects come back, both to haunt and to goad you.” An interview with John Jeremiah Sullivan. | Chapter 16
- Live out your escapist fantasies/plan your flight from the country with 25 books about Americans living abroad. | Flavorwire
- Giving voice to the strange, obsessive pull of the Italian language: Is Italian literature having its *moment*? | Asymptote
- “The novel is a Rorschach test, a blot of ink, therapeutic.” On feminism, fatherhood, and forgetting in Frankenstein. | Avidly
Also on Literary Hub: Introducing Caitlin Goodman, The Grumpy Librarian: what book you should read next · Enemy of the State: “I was the most wanted man in China” · At first sight: from Sebastian Faulks’s Where My Heart Used to Beat
