TODAY: In 1885, tanka poet Hakushū Kitahara (Kitahara Ryūkichi) is born.
- Paul Auster on activism, James Baldwin, and the horrors of Trump. | Literary Hub
- How Sherlock Holmes got his name: on the origins of the icon. | Literary Hub
- Roxana Robinson: Donald Trump has made the word “pussy” great again. | Literary Hub
- Rick Moody on how to write sober. | Literary Hub
- How to celebrate Robbie Burns, the Bard of Ayrshire, on this, his day (hint: whisky and haggis and poetry). | Literary Hub
- Joan London on Australia’s honorary Russian master, Elizabeth Harrower. | Literary Hub
- “I care about articulating states or conditions that we don’t have easy language for. I care to find ways to articulate aspects of the inner life. I’m interested in writing as a form of introspection.” An interview with Anuk Arudpragasam. | Guernica
- Nick Rougeux has diagrammed the iconic opening lines of famous books to create Literary Constellations. | WIRED
- “Donald J. Trump could never be mistaken for Mark Antony—other, perhaps, than by the man himself—but the play is as current today as it ever was.” On the resonances between our current political climate and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Richard III. | Times Literary Supplement
- “Books are especially useful because the depth of engagement that someone has with a book allows them to really stay with it and to spend some time with that different perspective.” An interview with Lisa Lucas, executive director of the National Book Foundation. | Chicago Review of Books
- Newspeak, doublethink, and alternative facts: 1984 has become the 6th bestselling book on Amazon following Kellyanne Conway’s interview defending Sean Spicer’s statements. | The Guardian
- “Nothing energizes me more as a human being or as a writer than writing about that untamed desire for someone else’s body.” An interview with André Aciman. | BOMB Magazine
- An intellectually unique, often aesthetically sublime, experience: On the “bibliophilic bliss” of physical books. | The Millions
Also on Lit Hub: On her birthday, some famous puns about Virginia Woolf · Listen to Alia Shawkat read from Holiday Reinhorn’s story collection · From Jonathan Coe’s new novel Number 11.
