TODAY: In 1566, feminist French Renaissance poet Louise Labé, also known as La Belle Cordière, dies.
- Ginny Hogan on why we love to see the beauty and disappointment of toxic female friendships on the page and the screen. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Hannah Zeavin on class, race, gender and how caregivers disrupt the fiction of the nuclear family. | Lit Hub History
- “In the end, we are all cursed, cursed by oil’s ease, seduced by its possibilities.” Don Gillmor on the impact of our addiction to oil. | Lit Hub Politics
- Joan Didion’s Notes to John, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Exit Zero, and Emily Henry’s Great Big Beautiful Life all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- “She was familiar with ‘my kind’—a young Black man striving to exist within the frame of societal and familial expectations.” Doug Jones on community as a queer Black writer. | Lit Hub Craft
- Casey Johnston explores the “uncomfortable reality” of writing about the body. | Lit Hub Craft
- “I’ve moved to this city to wait for the end of the world. The conditions couldn’t be better.” Read from Antonio Muñoz Molina’s novel Your Steps on the Stairs, translated by Curtis Bauer. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Was this Montana woman the first enfant terrible of American letters? Hunter Dukes on “the wild woman from Butte.” | Public Domain Review
- “Even at the point of annihilation, Lem allows for the possibility of revelation.” Marat Grinberg considers Stanisław Lem as a Jewish writer. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- José Olivarez and Jon Sands remember Aziza Barnes: “No one else sounds like them.” | Poetry
- Heather O’Donnell on the legacy of Belle da Costa Greene, one of history’s most iconic librarians. | New York Review of Books
- “At some point in our acquaintance, he greeted me by kissing me fully on the lips, and from then on, this was our ritual, a smooch.” Jesse Barron on Gary Indiana and his final novel. | Granta
- Why Sophie Gilbert wants you to stop fetishizing Y2K pop culture. | The Cut
