TODAY: In 1905, O. Henry’s short story “The Gift of the Magi” is first published in The New York Sunday World.
- What happens when Gen Z encounters Catullus’s filthiest poem? “Reading wakes us up to love, culture, grief, war, a range of possibilities too vast to name, and also to great discomfort.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- Why novelists should gamble on themselves (and aim for a posthumous house museum). | Lit Hub Craft
- Adrian McKinty considers the “epistemological uncertainty” of Thomas Pynchon’s detective fiction. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Marion Winik reflects on telling secrets, writing fiction versus nonfiction, and her 1994 memoir, First Comes Love. | Lit Hub Memoir
- “By writing a memoir that serves as a magnifying glass to my own demons, I am also turning attention toward my mother.” Anna Rollins considers disordered eating, therapy culture, and the expectations of motherhood. | Lit Hub Craft
- Nadia Davids spends time with the ghosts of Apartheid: “It is the mid-eighties in South Africa and we are under a State of Emergency.” | Lit Hub Politics
- Sheldon Costa on the similarities between writing trash bashing and reckoning with creative self-worth. | Lit Hub Craft
- “Her mouth drops into a hesitant o when she first looks at herself in the mirror.” Read from Eshani Surya’s new novel, Ravishing. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Book designer Alison Forner discusses the process of creating the cover for American Canto. | Fast Company
- “The heart swells just thinking about a genuine literary ‘PHENOMENON’ occurring in a country whose days of mass literacy may be behind it.” Daniel Yadin on romantasy at the end of the world. | The Drift
- Can literary fiction save classical music? “But what is notable about this recent surge in classical music fiction is that many of these texts center on a scathing critique of the industry itself.” | Public Books
- Jay Caspian Kang meditates on what the internet has done to reading. | The New Yorker
- Jeff VanderMeer is exposing Instagram’s odd SEO-choices. | 404 Media
- How medieval art and literature conceptualized the moon. | Aeon
