LitHub Daily: January 5, 2016

TODAY: In 1902, Stella Gibbons, author of Cold Comfort Farm, is born. 

• Adam Gopnick on the editor of Charlie Hebdo’s posthumous manifesto and the fine art of blasphemy. | Literary Hub
• If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to read more, here are some suggestions with which to start. | The Millions, Vulture, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Ploughshares
• “People think swimming is carefree and effortless. A bath! In fact, it is full of anxieties.” A short story by Anne Carson. | The New Yorker
• On contemporary America and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which states, “It’s always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Following 1967, Sweden indulged in a nationwide du-drink, allowing individuals to refer to each other as “you.” | Slate
• On the “innovative and exasperating” Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai. | Virginia Quarterly Review
• Contemplating the battle between art and immediacy: On Roberto Calasso’s The Art of the Publisher and Sven Birkerts’s Changing the Subject. | Bookslut
• Eighteen copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio, which are usually kept in the real life equivalent of the laser vaults in spy movies, will tour the US. | NPR
• “Know that the desire to be perfect is probably the veiled expression of another desire – to be loved, perhaps, or not to die.” Illustrations to accompany Ron Padgett’s “How To Be Perfect.” | The Paris Review

Also on Literary Hub: The time Kate Axelrod’s grown-up novel was marketed as Young Adult · Books making news this week: the first raves of 2016 · From Samantha Hunt’s Mr. Splitfoot

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